I am a huge fan of the tabletop roleplaying World of Darkness setting, in basically all of its incarnations. I continue loving it despite its various intricacies and inconsistencies that pile up over the years. My biggest roleplaying obsession has got to be Vampire: The Dark Ages, so I have a lot of digital ink to spill on the setting and the systems it uses one day. As a metaphor for the self, the game is beautiful and transcends what seems like pulp gothic vampire framing to become, at its best, a game about struggling to be human, to figure yourself out. To try to reconcile potential with reality. There has been a relative wealth of material produced as accompaniment to the “new” (is 2018 still new?) edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, the long-running tabletop roleplaying game. I have only just now started to play some of that material, and the best of the lot so far is Shadows of New York, actually the second in a series of three visual novels from Draw Distance, all set in New York. I also played the first one, but it was the second one that jumped out at me and actually had me interested. Not only does it have a truly fantastic soundtrack, truly moody and “World of Darkness-y”, it also has fantastic art and a great sense of place. At times it feels a great thematic accompaniment to Bloodlines, which is a game I need to talk about at length but I haven’t yet managed to get a video essay finished from. Regardless, know that I think very highly of Bloodlines and so to compare the two is very high praise indeed. Above all, Shadows of New York has a truly compelling protagonist.

Our playable point-of-view character Julia is someone who has tried her whole life to write good stories as a journalist. Her life falls to bits as she is targeted by a vampire to see whether she is worthy of becoming one. When she is Embraced (turned into a vampire) by a Lasombra, a member of the Clan of Shadows, she suddenly has to reconcile her new powers and her new inhumanity with the lust for power that threatens to take away what little humanity she has left. Julia is jaded, burned out, and her life has been destroyed systematically by the woman who turned her into a vampire. What she has left will define her.

The game does not necessarily do everything that it possibly could with this set up. The game ends well, but also on a note of promise that may never be followed up. Julia is such an interesting character that it feels criminal to leave her with so few dialogue choices and so little time to get to know her. The game has a “trait” system that is generated by a few pivotal choices, and these are used to determine what decision Julia makes right at the end of the game. It is a good system for this simple, cumulative choice, but it does feel a little lackluster or disappointing just in that I wanted more. Julia – a queer immigrant who struggles to find her way in New York, struggles to relate to human beings, struggles to find her place in this new vampire underworld – has rich, rich potential as the protagonist of a fully-fledged RPG, or a game in which slightly more is going on, anyway.

Nonetheless, what is there is very well done. A local vampire eventually winds up dead, and unravelling who murdered him – meeting interesting characters along the way and deciding whether to hurt or help them, or fail at both – is a great time. It took me about two or three hours, but there are some well-written characters, and some nicely written prose. The art is also great at drawing you into the headspace of the characters, and there are also some great references to works of literature and art I hadn’t heard of before.

Shadows of New York really does rely on Julia as a character to work for you, and she really did. She struggles so much with her own mental health and self-loathing, ideas of satisfaction and power fighting in her head. She chain smokes. She suffers from writer’s block. She frequently dissociates from her own body, she can’t look at her own reflection. Other than the chain smoking she sounds worryingly like me sometimes. At one point, she says: “No dice. I always fall back into the same old habits. It’s like they were encoded deep in my DNA. The aimlessness, the powerlessness, the spiritual exhaustion. These goddamn fast food trips.” And fuck, if I didn’t feel that in my soul.

Her love for her girlfriend is complicated by their unhealthy reliance on one another – one for human contact, stories of emotion and sun and inspiration; the other for exciting stories of multifarious and multifaceted dark, underground things. Both the quiet and the loud moments work because of the game’s focus on character. I also quite liked the split between “plot moments” and “pick a side thing to do to define Julia more” moments. There are very deeply human, raw moments of searching and lusting for meaning in this game that are articulated very well as arguments or discussions between two characters. People just trying to figure out who they are and what they want to be. Beneath all the jostling for power, there are just people. And maybe one day you wake up to find you’ve crushed the old person you used to be – therein is the horror at the heart of Vampire, distilled perfectly into the tortured, struggling, confused, triumphant character of Julia. Recommended if you want a good “game to read”, and doubly so if you want one that is set in the World of Darkness  – it has been the best visual novel I have played so far in the setting, and ugh Julia is so good, I need more! She will probably go in a list of “favourite video game protagonists”, she’s that good – if only the game wasn’t so short, I would recommend it even more highly.

As it stands, Shadows of New York is a great character study of what happens to someone who has the chance to rise to the top, when they have almost nothing left to lose. But maybe what they have to lose is worth fighting for. Julia is linked closely to me in my mind due to her struggle with her own identity and her own potential. The choice she opts to make at the end of the game inadvertently helps to define both her, and has the potential to help to define you.

You can buy Shadows of New York from Steam.