Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives Reviews

Great

My only complaint is that I couldn't romance Corliss. Other than that, had a great time.

Love it. Would love a parser-style game like this with maybe more open world. Get the DLC

A captivating narrative that branches out in complex directions. The replayability of this game is astonishing, and I would recommend the DLC for it adds a whole new side to the story.

While it was well written, I felt that Night Road was better in this regard. Where this game excelled in was the importance of your choices and the large number of permutations throughout the story. There are only a few scenes that you’ll see in every playthrough, while the rest of the story can vary considerably. I was amazed at just how different each campaign can progress, with the two playthroughs often feeling like entirely different stories. This game requires multiple reads if you want to see the entire story, as there are often multiple events happening at the same time in each chapter and thus you can only see one of them, which will be based off the choices you’ve made and who you’ve chosen to ally with. After my first reading, I was disappointed that the game left so many questions unanswered, and that so many characters who initially appeared to be important ended up playing almost no role in my story. However, I immediately started a second playthrough, and what I encountered was an entirely different story-line that focused on different characters and answered some of these questions. In fact, that second campaign illustrated how little I had seen and learned in my first playthrough. The game is like an onion, with many different layers that need to be peeled back. To see everything, you’d likely need to play the game four or five times. As you’d expect from the title, this game is far more focused on vampire politics, making allies, and intrigue than Night Road was, and it’s a stronger story because of it. Every character has an agenda and their own goals. In general, the characters are fantastic, far better than Night Road IMO (though perhaps this is because you spend more time with them in this one). They feel interesting and real, which really immerses you in the story that the author is telling. And like Night Road, this game also has illustrated portraits for characters, which is nice to have. The skill system is far simpler compared to Night Road, as it only has the attributes from VtM and none of the actual skills. There’s a lot less instances where they are used as well, and they are the percentages that are more typical with these types of games rather than Night Road's dots which are more VtM accurate. You also don’t earn experience, instead skills either increase from your actions in the early game or you select which ones to increase in your dreams in between chapters. The game also doesn’t track your money and there isn’t an inventory. It does visibly track your relationship with all the major characters though. Thus, I preferred Night Road’s leveling up system and I loved its inventory and shopping, but I did prefer that Parliament didn't have as much focus on your skills. I also preferred the way that disciplines were done in this game. You don’t invest in them at all, instead you just have access to all three of the disciplines of your chosen clan from the beginning, and most of the time they guarantee success (though like Night Road, they do require blood). What I liked most is that outside of a few rare circumstances you can’t get access to more than your clan's three disciplines, which gives each clan a unique feel and encourages you to try different ones in later playthroughs. I should end this with a mention of the romance options. There are two characters you can romance in the base game (one male named Qui and Jordon, whose gender is based on your sexual preference) and another two added in the DLC (Lucca & Sevinc, both female). I really enjoyed Lucca’s romance arc, however I felt like I had to dedicate my entire playthrough to doing her personal missions in order to see the entire thing play out. I wasn’t as impressed with Jordon’s romance, but spending time with her/him did result in uncovering some important information that I did not learn in other playthroughs. Therefore, I recommend getting the DLC just for Lucca’s romance, but the best part of “What Stares Back” is the two additional clans. I haven’t tried the Lasombra yet, but my Malkavian playthrough was amazing. An incredible amount of new content was added for this clan, resulting in a very unique playthrough. I don’t want to spoil anything here; I’ll just say that that you absolutely must try a Malkavian character at some point. Though as the author recommends, you should play through once with a different clan first. My first playthrough took 10 hours to complete, so despite having just a little lower word count it was noticeably shorter than Night Road, but I think it’s also far more replayable.