Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York

... and if you didn't, you probably won't. If you don't know what Coteries of New York is, I suggest you to look up its page and have a look at the reviews (I also wrote one) to get an idea (although playing that game is not a prerequisite for enjoying this one, I'd recommend it). Taking the previous game as baseline, I can say the following about Shadows of New York: = still a visual novel, based on the same engine as Coteries, the only graphical innovation are a couple of grainy videos that in my view did not bring much to the story or the atmosphere. There' s an autosave and no possibility to save the game manually, but as I said for Coterie, for this kind of game is not that big of a deal - still no "intelligent skip" that skips only the parts you have already seen in a previous playthrough +/- there's no character selection, you play as a specific character. This reduces player choice, but helps the writers build the character better = still overall a very good vampire story - short like Coteries; expect a playthrough to last 3-4 hours depending on your reading speed; unlike Coteries, the single character focus gives me little motivation to play it again. ++ the dialogue with Dakota on conspiracy theories is the best piece of videogame writing I have read in recent times - The devs have marginally improved player agency by providing multiple (three, but in practice two) endings, but on the other hand the structure of the game makes it much clearer that a lot of the choices you are given don't matter at all. I found Coteries better at maintaining the illusion of agency, although everything falls apart by the second playthrough. Overall I´d say that the story is better, but the gameplay (what little there is) is worse, and this leads me to rate it the same as Coteries (base two stars, plus one star because despite all the flaws, I still really enjoyed playing it).

SoNY was my first introduction to the Lasombra beyond a brief glance at the source book. I expected lots of brooding, moping, and maybe a good whodunnit mystery. I didn't expect lots of deep choices and branching stories. I played Coteries, and that's not how these developers, with this medium, do things. What I got was an interesting little short fiction that built on the characters we met in Coteries, and used them to examine how far we are prepared to compromise how we see ourselves in order to become something more. The novel didn't (visibly) record the usual RPG stats. Instead, at make-or-break moments, I made decisions that set Julia's personality, sometimes not how I intended but in a way that worked for her. So as a game, this isn't VTM: Bloodlines. I didn't manifest my own character and run through the city. I got a good little novel where I helped define a conflicted character's personality, and saw where that led her. I literally shouted "What?" at some of her final decisions, because they weren't mine. But they were the decisions that could make sense for her. And that's why I'm rating it so highly. I went in expecting a whodunnit, and maybe some more developed mechanics from Coteries. I got a damn good story that used the VTM lens to examine contemporary social issues, and more than a passing mention of the Covid pandemic and the pressure on people. I got a discussion of people feeling powerless and seeing how far they'll go when they have an opportunity to change that. This isn't Bloodlines, it's definitely not Bloodlines 2. You're not running around the playground pretending to be your fantasy creature of the night. You're getting a damned interesting story. Not high literature, but enough to make you think, which can be good after 7 months of plague and lockdown. Worth the price of a few beers, for sure. Oh, and if you want to play the RPG, but don't have a coterie of your own, this and Coteries did help take the edge off, at least for me.

Relative to Coteries of New York, I felt that the writing took a big step down in this one. It was packed with pop-culture references seemingly for their own sake, the personalities of the returning characters felt very off, and the writing felt generally shallow and simplistic. It also seemed more linear than its predecessor, with fewer branches to explore. Overall, this felt like a piece of bad Coteries fan-fiction.

I played this after Coteries expecting it to be similar, but it was actually quite a bit better. Like Coteries, this is a visual novella, not an RPG; don't expect it to be Bloodlines 2. The story is mostly linear, though the ending does change depending on your previous choices. Coteries wasn't bad, but the ending was unsatisfying, and it kind of felt like a demo of the 5e New York setting, buoyed by some interesting characters. This game, on the other hand, is actually a complete story with a cathartic resolution and rather good writing; the romance plot is maybe the best I can think of in a video game. The art's good too, and captures the VtM atmosphere. Some of the very current slang and references may not age well down the line, but they also make the story feel real to a degree. Unfortunately, like the first game, it does suffer from some technical limitations. The Linux version is literally unplayable out of the box due to an incorrect path in the startup script; thankfully, I was able to diagnose and fix this in five minutes or so, but surely the professional developers could have bothered to do the same. More vexing is the lack of manual saving. If you make a choice and don't like the outcome, or click the wrong one, your only remedy is to start a new game and skip through back to the desired point, or manually back up the save. Overall, I would enthusiastically recommend this to fans of the VtM world who enjoy visual novels, especially when on sale.

It's way better than Coteries of New York, the writing, the music, the art and the animation! I have to give a special shoutout to whoever wrote the Main Character, what I really disliked about the predecessor was that all the PC's had their own background but no personatlity. With Shadows of New York, I really got in touch with the Juila. If you're looking for a game where your choices matter and you have a million diffrent endings, then stay away from this game. I assume there's two endings and maybe a secert death ending as well. If you're looking for a very well written NOVEL with amazing music,art and dialouge then look no further, I'd love to see more of Juila, she was amazing!