Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road Reviews

VtM Night Road is probably one of the better-written interactive stories currently out there. VtM tends to focus more on big cities by default, so having to survive in a rular enviroment with prey spread thin and hunters at seemingly every turn was pretty fun. The characters were pretty compelling (even though I still can't understand how Julian thought his plan would ever work, to be entirely honest) and overall believable for the setting. Overall it is a competently-written story, but there are some inconsitencies in places (especially regarding the protrayal of Blood Sorcery as a one-size-fits-all discipline, completely disregarding the incopatibility between different sorcery traditions, which your character seemingly knows all of after learning just the basics of the discipline) which will likely annoy people who care about lore-accuracy a lot. Overall, a solid 8/10. Looking forward to reading more stories from this series.

This is basically a simple text adventure with some illustrations of the major characters, and, due to not being saddled with the contraints of expensive animations/graphics/voice acting, it's able to offer sufficient choices that I never encountered a situation where I wanted "none of the above", and follow through with appropriate consequences. Also, every choice describes the exact action you take or your verbatim dialogue, there's none of that vague dialogue wheel nonsense in some of the bigger budget games so you can create a consistent "personality" for your protagonist that doesn't get diluted by shoehorning you into Nice, Mean, and Clown, and even give them a bit of character development through your responses to various events and characters. The "game" part with the stats is not particularly demanding; I'd last touched WoD in its heyday decades ago and only vaguely remember the tabletop system, but if you read up on what the stats and abilities do and then develop them intuitively you'll generally get through most challenges - my initial playthrough I didn't even realize there were actual stats until about 1/4 of the way in and succeeded at mostly everything I tried to do by picking the obvious choices I had high stats in once I figured out how to show that (Storyteller Mode). The story is immersive and written with a touch of humor that doesn't break atmosphere, and the descriptions create a detailed world filled with interesting and memorable characters (whether you like them or not on a personal level is a different kettle of fish) but your ability to interact with them or explore their backgrounds is relatively limited and sometimes requires reading between the lines a bit, which is the one story area that I would have liked more expansion on. There's a fair amount of effort to explain the setting and various terminology but someone who is completely new to WoD may get a bit lost. The biggest downside is the lack of voluntary save/load, which I get adds to the suspense of the story but is mildly inconvenient if you're curious about the results of some specific decision but then have to reproduce the whole run up to that point to see what it does. Overall, surprisingly engrossing and enjoyable despite the simple format, even if you're not a particularly diehard fan of the franchise/setting.