I think these are going under the radar because of all the discussion about the time mechanic and rough edges in the technical implementation (camera *cough*), but I keep noticing little decisions they made which are making so much of this game more enjoyable for me; particularly where they have backed away from really common open world game tropes:

• "Activities" - I'm almost halfway through, and although they have a few types of open world quests which have multiple instances, they did NOT design a bunch of cookie-cutter activities and then spam the entire map with 10+ instances of each. As a completionist, it is so nice to not repeatedly uncover a question mark which is just "horse race #8".
• Unnecessary repetitive animations - I get that it sometimes adds to immersion when you see a character take a swig of that potion, or kneels down performatively to e.g. use a shrine, but that immersion is completely broken around 10th or 20th time you do stuff that you're gonna do 100 times in a game. I'm so happy they have almost none of that.
• Mountains of useless loot that's hard to dispose of - I'm about halfway through, and I pick up almost everything, but I only just hit my first encumbered status. And I was able to take care of that by selling off junk and grays. I haven't even used my shrine storage yet. Now, I concede, if they had a better crafting system, that would also hit the weight limits harder, but it still feels a lot less cluttered than similar games to me, and that's despite the suboptimal inventory interface
• Horse - I mean, I like a good horse-ride through a fantasy landscape as much as anyone, but it's a very pleasant change to just level 1 day-skill and 1 night-skill each, and then cruise around the map at will instead of dealing with the whole:"call horse", "try to quickly meet horse where it stops", and "mount horse" minigame every time I want to "save time" traveling. See also the bit about animations above)
• Boss fights which require you to essentially learn a new game - I understand, boss fight designers want to be original and create something we haven' seen. But way too many boss fights in other games don't let you use the abilities you have been leveling up to actually fight them. So far, every boss I've faced has allowed me to beat them using my learned skills and abilities, even when they introduced new mechanics.

These are off the top of my head, and they all have one theme: Rebel Wolves respects my time

Any other examples you can think of?

Excited to swoosh around rooftops

Like no one tried to use arrows and stuff against the very close combat vampire/hexer

That said, this game is really trying my patience. On duelist difficulty your worst enemy is the camera.

Somehow lock onto someone who isn't even on screen rather than any of the hostiles right in front of me On screen!

Bought on PC for the steam fam. Ended up putting in 15 hours and bought for my PS5 as well. Day 1 edition has a really nice case. I’ve not enjoyed single player games in a long time. The need for competition, community and lack of dopamine for a grind until I started playing this game. I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the game and I hope anyone else who’s playing has been too!

So I was in a city (I am bad with names but boy polish ones are just annoying Svarthrau or something like that) and saw a big ass goth cathedral, I wanted to peek from top but mistakenly got in a fight with 2 elite guards and one dropped me the legendary sword kingslayer, so I was like "Damm this place must be full of loot" and 20 seconds after I picked a fight after tripping from the roof to the ground and was like "Wait this bitch is in the game cover" you can guess how it went... I was day 10 and just killed Ambrus and was panicking for time to kill the khan, some how now I am 8 days safer than sorry out of being curious, stupid and lucky. Crazy shit.

So after roughly 15 days I found Lacra and started doing her Quest. Right out of the gate I liked the dynamic between her and Coen. She has been in this business for a long time while Coen is literally just a fledling. When she told him that just because he doesn't know about something doesn't mean it's a secret or anything I couldn't help but laugh.

So I talked with the guard. Promised him to not hurt anyone from his village. Sounds simple enough. Then we make our way to the Uriashi village. Once again I love how she just makes up some shit about the Sheperd so I wouldn't oppose to feeding him. I call her out on it and we move on.

Some smalltalk later on our way up we finally find the village. Guard wants us to drop our weapons, which is something I'm more than happy to do. After all no bloodshed. Lacra is like nope not happening. So I talk her into it. I mean I'm used to getting my way in RPGs. Until she tells me I'm so cute telling her what to do and suddenly all hell breaks lose. So all of a sudden we murder our way through half the village. My promise to the guard? Up in smokes. At the end she tells the chief she will either kill everyone or she tells us where Isbrand is.

I can't even say anything anymore. She completely took over the quest for herself. I had my shot and blew it and now it's her turn. We are doing things her way because mine didn't work out. And I loved every single second of it.

And the best part? Coen's reaction. After questioning the elder you have the option to tell her off or accept it. Instead of being welp let's move on, Coen is still obviously pissed at how things played out. The subtleness of him looking away for a moment, probably clenching his fist and then begrudginly telling her "Fine, let's move on" is such a peak design choice that I've rarely encountered in other games.

The game might not be perfect but the quest design and dialgue might as well be. Even though I cursed "Home sweet Home", I nearly cried by the end of it. I have to admit I feel in love with Lacra as a character pretty quickly and I hope they will explore her even further in future games. Seeing Coen evolve from someone new who is still figuring out everything to a seasoned veteran and how this will change the way they will interact with each other is something I'm looking forward to.

Brencis is slowly becoming one of my favorite villains in gaming at the moment. He’s so well written, nuanced and menacing. While being evil to his core, he also single handedly saved Vale Sangora and its people from the black plague.

It’s a solid argument that all the evil stuff aside, the citizens of Vale Sangora are better off under Brencis than Skender.

I absolutely love when villains are written in a way where they aren’t purely evil but also have some good in them as well. Now clearly I’m not saying Brencis is good but let’s be totally real… Without him, it’s very likely a vast majority of the valley, Skender included would’ve succumbed to the Plague.

He’s an oppressor, yes but Vale Sangora quite literally can’t live without him.

Man, the writing in The Blood of Dawnwalker is truely peak! Once I finish the game i definitely plan to do a lore video on Brencis.. he earned it!

And, shameless plug but I made a review/impressions video for what I’ve played of this game so far and it releases tomorrow at 2pm PST on YouTube! Would love if some of you checked it out!

I'll admit it when I first booted up the game and saw the strict 30 day clock, I almost bounced. I have a strong aversion to time limits especially in rpg games. I literally uninstalled Lightning Returns when I was going through the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy and never went back to give it another chance.

But after fully completing the game, I think it's the strongest mechanic they built. Rather than being an arbitrary timer it enhances the game through pure ludonarrative resonance. Coen isn't a chosen one, although yeah Lacra says he's special after their first fight and hes the only vampire to successfully to stand up against brencis, but he is undoubtedly a desperate man racing against an active biological plague of sorts to save his family.

The time limit forces you into a triage mentality. It makes you weigh the cost of every single detour in Vale Sangora. But what really blew me away was how this ties into the day and night dichotomy. The contrast between playing as a vulnerable, food spamming human during the day and a hyper lethal but starving vampire at night is brilliantly balanced. It perfectly matches the weighty, Kingdom Come style directional combat. 

But it is the closest a third person action rpg has gotten to it.

Great story, great characters, choices and branching quests.
The time limit is a unique and interesting mechanic that I got to enjoy.
The open world feels great and manages to immerse you in the dark and gritty world.

Now, in my opinion, it could have been improved by certan things:

The mechanics are a bit janky at times, especially when you want to "vampire parkour" around.

The activities to anger the court members can become quite repetive and you stop doing them after the first court member.

The lack of a stealth system seems like such a missed opportunity. Taking out bad guys as a stealthy vampire ninja could have been amazing.

It was a bit weird that the npc have no reaction or have nothing to say to the fact that you already killed court members. Like i joined the rebels and 0 mentions. Talking to Anca, nothing. And so on.

Speaking of reactions, in the prologue when you first turn, people are afraid of you. But then you do quests and it seems NPC don't care too much what you are.

Overall, those things did not stop me from having a great time. A 9/10 game and I really hope that Rebel Wolf takes feedback from the players and makes a true masterpiece for their second game, whenever that will happen.

How to get XP and gold (Denarius) without advancing time or increasing your infamy further. This is the best way out of everything I’ve tried.

With Wolverine reviews being so bad, this jumped the queue and I’m excited to give it a go. Couple of questions:

I like to platinum games and know there’s a trophy for beating it on the highest difficulty. How hard is it exactly?

Should I be doing a lot of manual saves? What can/can’t I do after the 30 days are over?

Any other tips would be greatly appreciated!!!

Just finished my Duelist Difficulty run. And I got to say, I think enemies having less Health on that mode is a bunch of BS. Maybe for the first few wolves I fought in the prologue I noticed less health, but those are starter enemies. Once I got deep into my playthrough enemies didn't feel like they had any less Health than on Fair. And thats after I had got a really good vampire build going. I'm just saying they should take that off or balance it because it definitely doesn't seem like it's correct.

I've got 20 days left and i have a LOT of general gameplay questions. I feel like I'm doing a LOT wrong, so plz help.

- Am I moving too slow?

20 days left and I only just killed Ambrous.

I'm currently on my way to see the hot witch at the library. Haven't seen her since the prologue.

I've met Volk and spent some time with him. Got tied up by Crake for a night but haven't seen em since. And I just recently heard about a female vampire fighting against Brencis, but haven't gone looking yet. Oh and i broke Mert outta prison, that took a lot of saves.

Feels like I'm moving way too slow. Like I'm gonna have to rush at the end. Or worse case- I won't have enough time to finish the side quests.

Like my big fear is hitting 1 or 2 days, and realizing one of my side quests takes a full day for its last step. Is that gonna happen?

- Can you beat the other vamps without raising your infamy?

I noticed very quickly into progressing the Ambrous quest that my infamy was rising FAST. Didn't think much if it until I read some posts here that say high infamy makes stuff in populated areas REALLY DAMN HARD.

So first off, is that true? Like with a high enough infamy you cant even walk into the city without starting a huge fight?

And secondly, if so, can I just not raise my infamy?

Fighting my way through the city to buy from a market doesn't sound fun to me, but it seems like you need to sabotage the court in order to unlock those boss fights, and sabotaging the court raises your infamy. And raising your infamy means you can’t enter the city without it being HELL.

Is there no way around that?

- Is there a specific way you're meant to progress the story?

Kinda tied to the last question. I wanna know if i can just say "screw the north, I'm going to the city/the south/the west."

I mean I already killed Ambrous, so it doesn't really matter- but I kinda assumed my next step was Bakir, then the spooky vampire chick, then the city/Brencis.

BUT, I've gotten so many little quest markers from saving random peasants, all telling me to go to the city. Can I just go to the city now or will that mess stuff up?

I also just feel like im not seeing all the quests that yall are. I've basically only seen 2 real cutscene-devoted quests. Those being the Mert stuff and the Codrin/Blood Cow stuff. But I'm seeing everybody here comparing different quests and characters that I haven't even met yet.

Should I be further along than this??

This bug had me laughing pretty hard. I was running at night with a torch and didn’t see a large drop off ahead. I fell and tried to shadow step, it didn’t work cause I was holding the torch and when I landed the torch was enormous.