I finished the Redux version yesterday and I'm still in awe. It's hard to describe the game as it's an atypical walking simulator, an atypical adventure game and an atypical horror game and it's hard to really say what it is at its core. One thing I can say about the game is that since the moment I launched it I felt the same kind of sensation that some old first person adventure games like Myst gave me back in the day. You're thrown into an amazingly beautiful yet eerie world that you just can't stop gazing at in awe, you wish to understand and the game manages to achieve that despite mostly taking place in a perfectly natural and almost trivial world. There is just enough "off" so the forests, lakes and old houses are kind of disturbing but in a very subtle manner. Suffice to say that the mindblowingly good environmental graphics and beautiful music do their job well. Admittedly I first felt like the game is giving me too little to go on, a message saying that the game won't hold your hand didn't help, it felt like more like an artistic experiment than an actual game at first but luckily that soon changed when the story began to unfold, even the more abstract things began making sense and I solved my first puzzle. "Puzzle" may not quite be the right word because usually you just have to interact with enough objects in an area to solve the "mystery" but the game still makes you feel like you are actually an investigator. That's great. The world isn't as open as I thought it would be and you're basically following one long path with the occasional crossing but that's a good thing as the world is open enough to make it worth exploring while making it almost impossible to get lost. So after approximately five hours of gameplay I made it to the end and I just loved it. The writing, story and voice acting kept me engaged and the ending did not disappoint me, despite what some people say about it. I only wish the game were a little longer and slightly more interactive.
It makes me very happy that, after a rough launch, Bloodlines has achieved a status as one of the best RPGs ever made. It deserves it. Of course it has aged: all the action gameplay, be it combat or stealth, was okay at best even when the game came out and has only gotten worse since. Even the efforts of the super dedicated team behind the Unofficial Patch couldn't quite salvage those aspects of the game. However, that's simply not what you play Bloodlines for. The true beauty of Bloodlines lies in its world and how you interact with it. I've played many RPGs over the years and to this day Bloodlines is perhaps the game with the largest amount of interesting characters I have ever played. Seriously, even small throw-away characters in Bloodlines have more soul and depth than most "important" characters in other games. Whether it's the vampire prince of New York or just a weirdo working in the hospital's basement: all of these characters are genuinely interesting. Virtually every line is written and acted with love and delivers an insight into vampire society or the depravity of man or gives you a good chuckle - or all three! Add a massive amount of dialogue options (which mostly don't follow blatant patterns) and an "immersive sim" style approach to exploration and resolving quests and you end up with a game that remains a joy to play also after five or even ten playthroughs. I'm sure that the game's almost depressingly nihilistic style sprinkled with lots of black humor isn't to everyone's liking but dammit, personally I'll never grow tired of walking through Downtown or Hollywood to Rik Schaffer's dark but weirdly beautiful music. And every time I return to this game I discover something I had never seen or at least consciously noticed before. The game isn't without flaws: you get forced into the mediocre combat a lot and it's janky all around but by God, the writing, acting and atmosphere alone make it a ride worth taking. Again and again.
