Why You Finished … Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

Memory is a funny thing. You can struggle to remember why you chose those jeans, or what you had for breakfast. The details of your wedding guest list can fade over time, just as the road leading to your first school dims. But you might be able to remember the smell of your first car, the joy at the wedding, and have an inescapable feeling of pre-regret when you think about tossing those faded Levis.

1994 was a long-ass time ago, but my incept date tells me I was alive and mostly functional around then. I remember partying, but not parties. I remember friendships, but not always transitory friends. But one friend has stuck with me all these years, because he confided in me that he would, given the option, want to die and be reborn a vampire.

By many measures, Bloodlines 2 is not a very good game. The performance is in the shitter, the skill tree application is on crack, and it commits the biggest sin of all: it says on the tin that you’re an Elder, a vampire of vampires, but then makes you everyone’s bitch.

Despite this, there’s just something about it. If I had to put my finger on it, which is sort of my job as a reviewer, it’s that The Masquerade – the bedrock of the Vampire: the Masquerade TTRPG this video game is based on – is a sort of ideological container. There’s a line in Ephesians, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Bloodlines 2 is a modern, inverted cross of that. It tells you that the things making you tired, the things making you feel complicit and small, are the rulers and authorities of our own world, just wearing better suits. And The Masquerade is just the armour you put on so you can finally meet them on even footing.

Like The Matrix, another 90’s classic, it helped people make sense of a broken world. The story firmament offers a… diagnostic, if you will, for why things feel wrong, and then the game provides a scaffold you can climb right to the top of. It gives you a storybook structure for navigating the complicity and cronyism that feels like it’s everywhere. It’s a rulebook for agency within a rigged system. The real world feels like it’s running on invisible, uncaring algorithms, but The Masquerade offers a different truth: the system isn’t broken, it’s just controlled by monsters. And once you know the monsters exist, you can finally start playing by their rules. It takes modern anxiety, that feeling that you are complicit in a dozen different global catastrophes just by buying groceries, and gives it a name. It tells you that your disorientation isn’t a personal failure.

It’s the correct response to a world designed to fuck with you.

There’s another thing this game system did before it became cool to hate everyone who wasn’t your generation. Within the world of Vampire, there’s not really a shelf labelled Boomers or Zoomers. The video game continues this, opening with you as Phyre, a displaced Elder vampire, rubbing shoulders with fledglings and thinbloods. You’d think an Elder would have it all figured out, and I sure as shit thought that about my parents, too. But the game does an epic-level rug pull, showing that centuries of un-life don’t make you immune to the vertigo of a shifting world. The game says, “We’re all new at this, all the time, and just trying to make it out alive.” What Bloodlines 2 does so effectively is letting you spend twenty or thirty hours experiencing, then understanding, the universal human disorientation we experience. It avoids the generational finger-pointing. There are no twenty-somethings complaining that the Elders destroyed the property market. There are no Elders saying if they stopped buying lattes they’d be able to afford a house. 

In this game everyone, regardless of their age or position in the stack-ranked hierarchy of vampire insanity, is equally lost and trying to figure out their place in a corrupt world. We are, just like in real life, all in this together.

This game was written by people who understood other people.

THE CHINESE ROOM

The devs of Bloodlines 2 came on my radar with an unexpected gem in the form of the remarkably dope game, Still Wakes the Deep. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but that’s a deeply personal story where you cruise about an oil rig while some weird-ass shit goes on. Like Phyre’s travels in Bloodlines, Caz McLeary’s life hasn’t been the one he thought it would be. The game was The Thing set on a drilling platform, a story-driven horror show, and just like Bloodlines, the meat of the story is that there’s external and internal horror.

It’s less, ”You are the monster,” and more, ”What monsters we become because of the world we’re in.”

It didn’t surprise me to hear they’d snared the Vampire licence to work with. Unfortunately for everyone south of this event, The Chinese Room’s strengths lie largely in linear experiences, not open world sandboxes. Bloodlines is a sandbox, where humans are the grains that sift between your grasping, blood-soaked fingers.

You awake in a basement, having been in torpor for a century, although you don’t know that yet. You’ve no idea what’s going on, who woke you, or why. Oddly, there’s a random voice in your skull, a guy you’ll get to know as the story rocks on. Hara Yannas as female Phyre is an absolute marvel, bringing the gravitas I’d expect from a pissed-off Elder to every conversation. Fabien, that voice in your skull, is played by Ronan Summers, and thank God he’s good, too, because you hear a lot of them together. It’s a testament to the strength of the character work and dialogue bonded to such capable actors that the thing I really missed at the end of this game was the way these people spoke. It didn’t feel like actors playing a part; it was as if they’d lived for longer than memory. I missed Fabien, a man as confused as the rest of us, for all his Malkavian mastery of the mind.

Wait, Malkavian? Some of you out there probably just thought my audio cut out, but I didn’t make that word up. In Vampire, the nights are hunted by clans based on the children of Cain. The tapestry is large and complex, so in the words of Inigo Montoya, I will sum up. The Camarilla are a dominant ruling sect of vampires, Voltron’d together with the largest component parts made up of Ventrue, Brujah, Toreador, Gangrel, Malkavian, Nosferatu, and Tremere. The Sabbat are the bad guys of the day in Bloodlines 2, and if we go deeper than that, I’m going to need a wall chart and seven hours.

Unless you’re a huge nerd like me, you won’t understand any of this, but the cool news is that you don’t need to. The game does an effective job of holding your hand, that basement wake-up call the beginning of a jumpstart into a Cliff Notes version of the Masquerade. While I appreciate I’m going to get pilloried for even saying a single part of this game is better than its predecessor, Bloodlines 2 does a more elegant job of introducing you to the Masquerade than Bloodlines did. Man, the OG gorilla-glues you to a random asshole right at the start who tosses out exposition like a walking Vampire Wikipedia.

But we’re not here to talk about the original Bloodlines! In the sequel, before you even fully understand who you are you have to choose what you are. You pick your clan, which dictates the flavour of your power just as it does the flavour of your curse. Because I dig on mages, I went straight for Tremere, a sort of warlock-slash-blood-mage power combo. It doesn’t matter that much in the end, because as an Elder you can accrete powers to yourself, living the best unlife of your dreams.

“This is dope,” I thought as I Hulked my way through the game’s opening hours. “I really don’t understand why people hated on this game. Maybe everyone’s a moron!”

THE MAINSTREAM IS MAINSTREAM

Most public discourse on this game hovered on its performance issues or its lacklustre vampire simulator capabilities, and I’m not going to argue with anything there. The game does, in fact, perform like pickled ass. There’s a mod that makes it much better, and I’m sure we could have a philosophical conversation about why a random hero of the community has to fix a developer’s shoddy work. The vampire simulator is also wonky, kind of broken right there in the axle, because for all you become more powerful, so does everyone else.

You are constantly playing catch-up with the game, even right until the end. Fights do not really get easy, despite you being a kindred of literal Titanic myth. But the biggest problem is that no one in this game treats you with any damn respect. Sure, you get awarded the role of Sheriff, but that’s a glorified enforcer for the Prince, a clown in a different motley. 

The game is trying to tell you that you are the closest thing to a god most people will ever see, but you can’t even get someone to bring you a piping hot cup of blood. Hell, there’s even a quest where you’re out there finding someone else a neck to suck.

I for sure understand that people expected a true sequel to Bloodlines, and this ain’t it. But the biggest problem for me is that this also isn’t what it promised. You can glide, or make people explode, or punch the souls right out of people in righteous anger. But never will you get the respect an Elder is due, not even after you uncover the rot that’s right at the core of the story.

You’re what goes bump in the night, but no one cares. I think this is because the developers were trying to tell a story, the same kind of story they told in Still Wakes the Deep. And a story like that needs some Avengers-level threats to combat, and it can’t do that well if you’re the threat.

This could all have been fixed by not making you an Elder, but I can see how their story setup and conclusion wouldn’t have worked in that scenario. Another fix would have been allowing your power to shine through. At the end of the game, and avoiding spoilers, you have to get from Point A to Point B, and there are like a zillion assholes in the way. By this part in the game you’ve soaked up enough Energon to regain your powers, but fighting everyone was just too damn hard. I ended up running all the way to the finish line, and letting them duke it out in my wake.

While I understand the brand that clipped your wings at the start, c’mon. That’s a narrative conceit we were done with by this point. What should have been a victory lap was an entire level of me running away with my tail between my legs.

LIGHT MAKES RIGHT

Despite sprinting being my most epic skill at the end, there is a boss and you do have to put them in the ground. Or, in the ground again, because they were already dead once.

While this fight was not, in my view, a very good boss fight, the story to that point was very good indeed. The entire messy tapestry of Seattle, the mistakes made by those in power, the complicit ease of corruption oozing its way into every crevice, and how that very corruption ended up being the downfall of a whole bunch of people who needed to die?

Yeah, that was cool.

While the game starves you of vengeful force, you are definitely a narrative force. But some of the most elegant parts are in the other characters joining your story. Lou Graham is the Seattle Prince, and someone who’s just not a very nice person. But the ones that stuck with me were earnest and focused Ryong, or clever, funny Tolly. Gideon was just the right kind of insidious, can’t-trust-that-guy kind of character, and Fletcher was a bit of a dick but he ran a nice club. The list goes on and on, all these people stacked right to the rafters with amazing character work and acting to match.

I loved to hate the bad guys, and there were a lot of bad guys. I mean, they’re vampires.

SO, FINISH IT

And here we are at the end. We begin to see why this story universe is so attractive, but also why it’s so powerful to hold in your mind. It gives you a reason why the world is broken: vampires. And you don’t have to squint too hard to copy/paste ‘billionaires’ over the top. And maybe that’s why I rolled credits on Bloodlines 2, despite how much the combat made my fingers hurt.

When my friend told me back in ’94 that he wanted to be a vampire, he wasn’t saying he wanted to drink blood or live forever. He was saying he was already tired. He was saying that the price of admission for living in this world felt too high, and he wanted out at any price. He wanted a different set of rules, even if those rules were written in the dark.

That’s what Bloodlines 2 offers, despite all its broken axles and pickled-ass performance. It offers an escape and reason bound together, an answer to why things are fucky and how, if you offer yourself to the wrong person, you could finally be on the right side of the looking glass.

You spend the whole game as Phyre, an Elder who is disrespected, underpowered, and forced to run away from fights you should win. It’s a huge pain in the ass. It’s unfair. But it’s also a world where the monsters have names. It’s a world where the corruption isn’t an invisible algorithm, but an undead, ever-living woman named Lou Graham sitting in a high-rise office. You know exactly who is pulling the strings, the director of the puppet show.

My friend didn’t need a perfect life. He just needed a world that made sense. He needed a place where his disorientation felt logical, rather than a failure. Bloodlines 2 isn’t a perfect game. It’s not even a very good one by most metrics. But for those of us who are tired, for those of us who are looking for a way to navigate a rigged system, it offers something better than perfection.

It offers a label, a looking glass, a framework, and a rulebook. It names horrors and shows them for what they are. It says there are reasons why things are the way they are, and it’s not fate or the hand of God. It’s people, the not-very-nice ones. But it also shows you that allies are in unlikely places, and that you can make a difference, underpowered though you might be.

My friend’s not a failure anymore (nor was he then). He’s got a good job. Hell, he’s a leader of people, with teams that respect him. He survived, and thrived, but he needed to realise it wasn’t him that was broken. The world is rigged, and Vampire is the clever clockwork metaphor that can give a few out there enough reason to hang on.

Sometimes, just seeing the monster clearly is enough to help you survive the daylight. 

Want more radically optimistic takes about broken jank? Here’s where you put your email to get ‘em right in your inbox: