Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York

Shadows of New York fixed a lot of the problems of Coteries. As in Coteries, the writing is good, the characters are fleshed out, the politics plays are even better, and the atmosphere is way darker; the music and ambient, along the more lively backgrounds and portraits with more expressions really help to deliver the mood. The biggest problem with Coteries is how little your choices mattered. Apart from the characters quests that could be cut short if you pick the wrong options, the ending was always the same. Shadows, on the other hand, have two different endings. Which ending is picked depends on the "traits" you develop by choosing certain options along the game, which helps replayability immensely and really makes you feel like your choices matter. However, and this is a strange bad point, the game still kind of fails as a standard Visual Novel. There's no "auto advance" option, which is completely shocking and one of the most basic features in a genre where you'll be passing page after page of text. I like how the game tries to force you to accept your choices and not letting you load old saves, but it comes as a dirty move and left you incredibly empty when you finish the game and it outright DELETE your savefile. The game is also somewhat short. By itself it would be pretty bad, but seeing the tomfuckery with the savefiles it is also a good thing, since achieving other endings may cost you less time. At the last point of contempt, I can understand why it was sold as an "standalone game", but really, you will get a lot of plot points if you play Coteries first (which is to say, you'll miss them if you don't). In conclusion, I can certainly recommend the game to VtM fans and VN enthusiasts, even if the second group would be just a little disappointed.

This is my first visual novel and I have to say, I am not dissapointed at all. The story is deep and dark, the music is creepy at the right moments and when you are a fan of the Vampire: The Masquerade series, you will love this game. Also the story is very contemporary, so you will see many pretty actual hints here and there.

Really an "Action" videogame ? We have no screenshot seeming different from a visual novel, and the same for the trailer..... and the same HD size as Coteries of New-York, i guess GoG did a confusion between the 2 games :-)

Shadows of New York will be enjoyable for anyone who liked Coteries of New York. It has a lot of the same strengths such as using the lore and universe of Masquerade; having great characters; giving you a lot of choices to make the character feel as your own; and having a great initial story. Like with Coteries though the story takes strange turns near the end that don’t quite feel like where it should have gone for me and left me a little unsatisfied. At first I felt like that I should have been given the option of which pivotal choice near the end to pick. The game is trying to say that you already made this choice based on your previous choices but I disagree with where that road should have led. The art and music are both top notch and serve to set the mood well. As with Coteries the dynamic backgrounds are really well used and set the visual novel apart from many others. I will also say that I really enjoyed the subtle references to Coteries thrown into the story for Shadows. I also thought that the traits system was a nice tough although it seemed a bit underused due to the game’s length. I played Shadows of New York on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. The game uses an auto save system that saves the game whenever you exit and picks up where you left off. This means that if you want to see how different choices pan out you have to do a whole new play through. I would have preferred a manual save option. You have 3 save slots for separate play throughs. The game uses the Unity engine. I played version 1_0_0_41075 from GOG. Disk Space Used: 3.4 GB VRAM Usage: 2080-2161 MB CPU Usage: 2-6 % RAM Usage: 1.7-2.3 GB AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4 | MSI RX 5700 XT 8GB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Linux Mint 20 | Kernel 5.4.0-48

I won't say it is of the best writing quality, but it's still okay. That's mostly where is the room for improvement. It could be better written, especially when it comes to vampires. Otherwise, people who know already Vampire - The Masquerade should be fine with it, and people who like reading investigating stories should be fine with it. And if you enjoy both, you have quite a good production with this title.