Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York

When compared to other visual novels, this is a very linear game, and harly any choices matter. What killed it for me was causing a scene in front of an NPC's house, getting scolded by him, and then two paragraphs later your companion commends it for being discreet. Or was it the moment when there's an opportunity to sacrifice your companion for personal gain buy looking away, there's a prompt to "calmly look around" and if you choose it - you magically overcome your opponent in a fight. Yeah, the latter. Recrouting your coterie, which I looked forward to, is simply doing side quests and having the companions make a token appearance toward the end. They do not seem to inflence any other events. The stories themselves are overall fine. Very millenial in their writing, that is to say they already look like they didn't age well. Music and pictures are nice. In the end, I can only recommend buying it at a discount. VTM:Bloodlines is still the game to go to, if you are looking for a more interactive vampire story.

For long-time fans of VtM, be aware that this is set in the new 5e (gWoD) universe, not the pre-5e universe (oWoD). It's awful.

Coteries of New York is a very faithful love letter to the series. It delves deep into the world of Kindred politics, so the writer(s) clearly did their homework. It goes into all kinds of elaborate details on their positions and politics that Bloodlines only touched on, so if you love Cainite political machinations, this is the game for you. They also did a great job on the characters. From the Sheriff to the Harpy to even the fan-service cameos like Aisling Sturbridge(I see you, Regentia), each is well fleshed out and has a great personality and distinct, flavorful artwork. The problems, of course, is that the team couldn't quite take the ball and run with it. Most of the plots involve little to no agency with the protagonist(expect a lot of "but thou must!"s or being railroaded into outcomes), come screeching abruptly to a halt, or leave the more intriguing NPCs out of the picture. If you can excuse that, though, this is still a fantastically written game, and shows a lot of potential if the team ever get another shot at it, or maybe plan on finishing Coteries with an expansion or continued stories down the line. There is massive potential here, it just needs to be built upon. (The devs' lack of communication over social media doesn't leave me optimistic, but I hope to be proven wrong.)

This was a impulse purchase while waiting for the next Bloodlines game and it did kill some time I suppose. The premise is not too far off from the original Bloodlines I suppose and there are some tie ins with it but the game play itself can get repetitive and story doesn't seem to change much each run through, I ended up fast forwarding just to get to different branches or achievements. With more game play options this could turned into a better more involved game but did come across as a stopgap for Vampire based games while the real things are being worked on. It might been nice for some sort of real development of the Coteries, missions or RPG type of system to give the game something to aim for beyond a quick dabble to get to the end for them achievements?

A lot of people seem to give the game one star because it's a visual novel while they wanted Bloodlines 1.5 - You have my pity. On the game proper, I really enjoyed it despite its narrative and technical shortcomings: -The sound tends to cut off inexplicably, and there's no option to go back if you missclicked. -The actual coterie doesn't really factor into the game, and some of the story chapters are pretty disappointing -The ending does come a bit out of left field, but the sequence had me on the edge of my seat. Still, as a package I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm not usually into VNs, so it's always a nice surprise to find a non-kinetic one. I would compare it to Solstice or NeoCab in that regard (Both fun games if you enjoyed this one)