There’s a number of grand mysteries laid out before you in the opening hours of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, which I previewed last month. Who, exactly, are you? Why have you been trapped in torpor for the last century? Who is this voice that’s in your head? And is there any saving Seattle’s vampire community as the Prince is murdered and everyone suddenly struggles for power?
Some of these mysteries are quickly unpeeled – Phyre, your player character, is a legendary Elder Vampire known to many as the Nomad, while Fabien, the voice in your head, was until very recently a PI, who’s been indelibly bonded into Phyre’s mind at the time of his death – while others are deepened as the politics, backstabbing and coterie of characters starts to come to the fore.
Our second hands on with Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 picks up right after where we left off with our first, but it’s still a sudden change of pace. You see, instead of playing as Phyre, I suddenly find myself as Fabian, who’s been called in by the club’s owner to meet with Pandora. Pandora, though, has been murdered in a particularly grizzly fashion in the club’s backroom, staked on lengths of rebar and with her head ripped off.
Exploring the scene highlights plenty that’s odd or wrong about this, but there’s something nagging at the back of Fabian’s mind. As he engages his Malkavian abilities to gain more insight, he’s bounced back even further to when he was a baby of a vampire in the 1920s, and an eerily similar murder of a cigarette girl, scouring this site now for clues to take back to his sire and the sheriff of the time.
I love this layered narrative approach, and while the opening hours of Bloodlines 2 are clearly rather guided to get you into the story, I’m really keen to see how the ties between different time periods and the mystery wrapped around Phyre and Fabian continues to unfold.
Brought back to the present as Phyre wakes up – this was just a dream of Fabian’s memories, it turns out – and there’s more pressing matters at hand. The new Prince has one especially troublesome thorn in their side that you might be able to help with, as Sheriff Benny has gone completely rogue and gone on a bloody rampage across Seattle to kill anyone he deems to be too inferior – Thinbloods and Ghouls, in other words. Would you mind helping out, and maybe the Prince will let you stick around in the city?
There’s a clear lead we can take here, trying to trace Benny to his usual hangout, a garage in a corner of town, which is being staked out by the Anarch Ghouls that he’s been waging his single vampire war against. It’s here that we find Benny’s own Sire, a surprisingly young-looking vampire who brought the tempestuous Benny into the fold, way back when. We’re able to use dialogue and persuasion to get him to open up, convince him that Benny needs to be caught and brought back to the Prince to face justice, while learning a bit about Benny’s personality along the way. Can we catch up to Benny and bring him in without a fight?
Not Anarchs, but these are enemies.
The trail takes us to a building site, once again surrounded by Anarchs, and with a clear bloody trail that Benny’s left behind him as he’s been both hunter and hunted, and plenty inconveniences in my way to catch up to him. On this occasion I specced up Phyre as a Tremere, able to use blood sorcery for long-range attacks, and rapid hit and run strikes and it was immediately a lot of fun trying to figure out and plan how I was using my abilities, saving up and spending blood charges earned from draining enemies while taking them out – easier when being sneaky, but vital when in the thick of combat to also restore health.
I leant on three key abilities during this, with Recall letting me place a warp point somewhere safe that I could teleport back to after striking at an enemy, perhaps gliding across or dropping from above before fading away. At the same time, I could cast a Blood Curse on an enemy so that they explode the next time that they take damage, which is hugely useful for taking out tougher enemies, but comes with a time cost to cast at longer distances and when they have higher health. Still, cursing someone from a distance and then hitting them with a brick was eminently satisfying. Finally, Cauldron of Blood could paralyse and fix an enemy in place, screaming from the torment, which is great for temporarily thinning out a group of enemies or letting you close a gap.
The Blood Curse ability in action.
Working through a string of combat encounters, I really enjoyed stringing these together, scrapping through moments that didn’t go quite to plan, and happening across some fun surprises. You know, things like being able to pick up guns – using telekinesis, of course, because who’d want to touch a gun? – and blast away at enemies. It makes a nice change from yeeting bricks.
It built up to a big battle with Benny, having failed to talk him down, and here using a mix of Cauldron of Blood to freeze him in place to I could Blood Curse him was massively effective. Alas, I never quite had the chance to grab guns of any Anarchs that dropped in to interfere with our fight.
With Benny brought low once more, the narrative side of the game could kick in once more. Katsumi, the leader of the Anarchs stepped out of the shadows demanding that Benny be left to face their own justice, and after wriggling my way through that, the Prince saw fit to offer me a job.
It’s at this point that the game will really open up and, while I could have explored Seattle before this point, the narrative will look to take advantage of the open world setting. While it might not play into the specific fantasies that the original Bloodlines did, of creating your own character and navigating this world as a Thinblood, I can’t deny that I’ve enjoyed exploring this character of Phyre, their inherent power and some contrasting abilities and combat styles, and the narrative possibilities that Fabian offers. There’s just around a month to go before the full game’s release on 21st October, but I’m looking forward to venturing into the snow-blanketed nights of Seattle.
