The Blood of Dawnwalker Review

There has been considerable discussion regarding the similarities between The Witcher 3 and The Blood of Dawnwalker in the lead-up to the latter's release. The connection is undeniable: the game is directed by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and developed by a team comprising many former members of CD Projekt Red. Furthermore, the game consciously evokes a similar experiential tone. There are numerous moments in Dawnwalker's world that feel uncannily like The Witcher's. This is evident in the earthy, touchable tone of the world, which feels as historical as it is fantastical. It is present in how the world reacts to the player, with characters voicing crude observations about the realities of tough existences. The brutality of the world, which can be unflinchingly cruel, also mirrors the earlier title, as does the Polish folk music that accompanies the journey. Even the user interfaces, gameplay mechanics, and dark supernatural themes are reminiscent of the legendary RPG.

These are among the most appreciated aspects of The Witcher 3, a game that has become legendary in RPG terms. Consequently, Dawnwalker launches from a powerful springboard. However, it is risky to be compared to a great. Thankfully, Dawnwalker manages to meet that high bar, if not quite raise it, while bringing new ideas of its own. The most significant of these new ideas is that the player is the eponymous Dawnwalker. You play as Coen, a young man living in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe in 1347, who is about to be partially turned into a vampire. Something prevents him from transforming completely, allowing him to walk and explore in sunlight. This duality means he effectively has two forms: vampire and human, which change automatically relative to whether it is day or night.

Having two forms allows the game to effectively give the player two characters in one, providing much-needed variation in a many-hours open-world role-playing game. This is a feature that The Witcher 3 suffered from. This duality is true of both combat and exploration. By day, Coen runs around the world like everyone else, on foot. But by night, he has no such restrictions. He can walk up walls and cliff-faces and teleport across rooftops. This is most apparent in the game's central city of Svartrau, which has densely packed houses and therefore rooftops. Night-time Coen can run around on these and hunt from above, whereas day-time Coen has to explore on foot below. This approach uses more of the game's world than if the player were rooted to the ground, opening up a rooftop playground. It gives the game more layers of activity to pursue. Some things can only be done at night because they require enhanced movement capabilities, whereas some things can only be done in the day because the player needs to be a part of the waking world. Moreover, it simply feels cooler to teleport around, slide down a huge wall with claws, or stand on a vertical wall with gravity shifted, than it does on the ground.

This leads to a pertinent question: why not just be a vampire all of the time? Well, to start with, you can't be; it will automatically change you when the sun rises. Secondly, there is the issue of time. But thirdly, you are also extremely capable during the day, just in different ways. You aren't only a vampire, but a witch of sorts. By day, you have extremely powerful spells and abilities that you can't use at night, such as the ability to slow time while speeding up movement to bomb around the world. You can also talk to dead people and perform rituals. These mutually exclusive witchcraft and vampire abilities are linked to skill trees, gelled by a central skill tree in swordsmanship, which is relevant to both forms.

Time as a Core Mechanic

The other big idea is time. In Dawnwalker, you control it; you determine when time moves. It doesn't just trickle away on its own; day never turns to night without you okaying that transition. You can run around the world buying and selling and fighting the odd pack of wolves, and time will effectively stand still. You move time deliberately by performing quests; every quest has a time-cost associated with it, denoted by segments on a time gauge. Should you come across a small and relatively insignificant quest, like helping someone out in the world, your time gauge in the top corner will ping to alert you to a possible time advancement. Bigger quests demand more time depending on the activity at hand. Even unlocking new skills can cost time, though mostly more powerful skills later on. The game does this because time is intrinsically linked to the game's story, whereby something has happened to Coen's family and he has 30 in-game days and nights to sort it out.

This ever-present clock shapes the game. To begin with, and for a lot of the adventure, it is more of an existential threat than a pressing one. You are aware that you are spending a limited resource, but there is so much of it early on that it doesn't seem to matter. There is plenty of time to do things. But time does start to dwindle as you finish quests and start spending time on skills. Days will turn into nights that will turn into mornings; 30 days becomes 20, then 15. It creates a low-level kind of panic, which is nice. Time passing is not something normally noticed in a role-playing game. In other games, the world waits. Here, it doesn't, and that feels more believable. It makes time a present factor in the world. Characters say "come back tomorrow" and it means something. Can you afford to? But time also creates a bit of a problem.

Famously, Dawnwalker doesn't have a main quest that leads you through the game. It has an overarching goal, but how you tackle it is up to you. Dawnwalker's prologue ends and the valley of Sangora stretches out before you, and the game goes: "off you go". Theoretically, you can go anywhere. In fact, theoretically, you can go and try to rescue your family and confront the final challenge there and then, though in reality, you probably can't. Areas of the world are higher level than others, which will either kill you or dissuade you from being there early on, so in this way, the game invisibly organises itself. There is also gentle direction from important questlines running through the world. There is an invisible hand steering you around, which is appreciated. But it is up to you when to take the final challenge on.

Testing this with 15 days to go, the half-way point, revealed a distinct imbalance. Feeling that the balance of power had tipped and fights were being won comfortably on Fair difficulty, the final challenge was approached. The result was being flattened; after a few attempts with some success, the same end was ultimately met. The enemies were higher level, leaving the distinct impression that it wasn't supposed to be there yet. Fine; that's what was hoped for, any excuse to go back out into the game's world. But then trying again in vampire form resulted in a very different outcome. There is a slight imbalance between the two forms in this regard. Eventually, when you have a really powerful sword and really powerful witchcraft abilities, and sword abilities, it probably levels out. But at that point, being much more potent as a vampire, with life-gain abilities that meant lasting longer in combat, cleared one battle after another until dropping bosses and beating the game. It wasn't easy, taking a few attempts especially on the final encounter, but success was achieved without any of the allies that were questing to collect.

Naturally, feeling proud about this and getting an achievement to underline it, the jarring issue came in the epilogue where it became clear that chunks of characters' story and of the game had been missed. Clearly, about half of what was out there had been done. This jarred because narratively, shouldn't it be a good thing that the family was saved as fast as possible? Except here, the game was also intimating: you missed some stuff, maybe you could have used more of your time? That's a clash between the narrative set-up and the RPG nature of the game. It also concerned that the game was finished much earlier than expected. What to do now? It is not sure where this falls even now. Reloading a save and going back into the world to try to ignore the fact of being capable of finishing it, and boosting the difficulty, but it does play on the mind. Nonetheless, the audacity of offering this possibility at all is admired. The question of "When do I attempt the end?" is far more interesting than "When will the game lead me to the end?", and all of the permutations referenced in the epilogue will make the conversation around "What did you do in the game - which ending do you get?" a lively one. This is probably a game to play a few times.

Plus, the moment of going back out into the world was immediately rewarded by a superb quest that would have been missed otherwise. Uniformly, they are excellent. All of the quests seem to involve multiple stages and either have interesting or eccentric characters to explore, or mature subjects to explore, or both. They are genuinely interesting; experiencing them is their own reward, though it helps that every activity in the game is materially very well rewarded as well. The quests can be this way because the mix of open-world activities alleviates the need to have any filler. There is a variety of activities that come across while exploring the world that are done there and then, with no back and forth, unless one activity leads to another quest. The only repeatable kinds of activity tie into a clever notoriety system, whereby each area of the valley is sort of ruled by one of the big boss' generals, so the things done there, usually against them, end up angering them. There are various different things that can be done to this end, but once enough of them are done, they will come for you, which is great. They will seek a confrontation somehow. It gives a great sense of purpose to exploring the wider world, while divulging backstory about these generals that otherwise isn't gotten, and there is a lovely potential pay-off if and when they are defeated.

Combat and Progression

But for all that there is a good mix of things to do in the world, a sense of repetition does creep in. Visually, effort has been made to vary the valley and to take the player to other places, but it is still a bit samey. There is also only so many of the same kinds of enemies that can be fought, be they soldiers, animals or otherwise, and though it takes a while to acclimatise to Dawnwalker's directional-block combat, eventually you will, and that is when a damage spongy element to enemies becomes mildly gruelling. It should be said that you don't have to direction-match blocks; you can "omniblock", as the game calls it, but if you can match the direction, you will be rewarded, usually with stamina refreshes, but later by skills that trigger from perfect blocks. There is a lot to like about this approach. Enemies never attack at the same time, which was a huge annoyance in The Witcher 3, so it is possible to take down large encampments of soldiers providing you pay attention to the directional indicators as blows come in. There is a sort of rhythm-action element to it that is always baseline entertaining, a battle with your own reflexes. But as the challenge of succeeding drops off, and the novelty of new enemies subsides, and as you grapple with fiddly annoyances like flipping between d-pad-based hotbars, and automatic enemy lock-ons changing if you crowd control one of them, combat can become a slog.

Changing difficulty helps this. Especially, and this might sound like a stretch but it is not, upping to the highest difficulty in the game, Duelist. This makes enemies more aggressive and has them attack faster, big-up games that change enemy behaviour rather than just health bars and damage, but it also lowers their health. It makes them more glass-cannony. It takes away directional attack indicators as well, something that can be turned on and off at will on other difficulties, but this is not as hard as it sounds like to deal with; it even puts your eyes more on the action than the indicators, which adds immersion. Duelist difficulty is doable, then, eventually, and it alleviates, along with powerful skills and abilities, the slog. Consider it!

There are ideas here about how to do things differently, and though they don't always work flawlessly, the intention is appreciated. This isn't just a reskin of an existing idea. Presentationally, it wouldn't be enough if it was, to be blunt. Visually it is handsome enough: characters have good detail and expressive eyes, and the game's attention to period detail is especially commendable. The way it throws evening sun on wattle and daub houses in Svartrau, or the way the moonlight twinkles on tiled rooftops, or the morning sun chases away the shadows of the night, these moments are endlessly coo-able. But it isn't a generational leap, if that makes sense.

Accessibility and Performance

The game offers a robust set of accessibility options, including motion blur on/off, bloom on/off, chromatic aberration on/off, depth of field on/off, remappable keyboard controls, two controller layouts, vibrations on/off, and subtitles on/off. These options ensure that the game is accessible to a wide range of players, allowing them to customize their experience to their needs and preferences. The inclusion of such detailed accessibility features is a positive step for the industry, showing a commitment to inclusivity and player comfort.

I am also incredibly impressed with the voice-work of the main characters in the game, with Coen's English-voice actor Will de Renzy-Martin in particular, who's softly spoken delivery reminds me of Tom Hiddleston and is endlessly listenable. Andrew James Spooner as Brencis is another stand-out, as are the actors who play Lacra and Anca, two central characters in the game. Lacra in particular is superb, armed as she is with pithy remarks, purring sensuality, but also vulnerability and depth. Her voice actor hasn't yet been revealed, surprisingly, but I am trying to find out who it was.

But, holistically, The Blood of Dawnwalker is more than these things. This is an RPG daring to do things differently, and a lot of what it does works. It is in little details like blacksmiths that can level up your old gear to match your new gear that I feel RPG expertise and experience from Rebel Wolves, that I feel understanding of how RPGs might play that little bit better. Then it is writ large in the way the game is structured and in the fundamentals of how it plays. In Coen, Rebel Wolves has discovered a dual-aspect hero that provides wonderful and welcome variation. In a time-limited and structureless world, although not quite as structureless as it might appear, it is discovered a way to make people pay more attention to the things they do, and be more present in their own adventures. I am not sure all of the elements quite sing in perfect harmony yet, but it makes me extraordinarily excited to see where this studio goes from here. The Blood of Dawnwalker is a hell of a debut.

A copy of The Blood of Dawnwalker was provided for review by Bandai Namco. The game is available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. The release date is September 3rd, 2026. The game is developed by Rebel Wolves and published by Bandai Namco. The game is a dark fantasy RPG with a strong emphasis on player choice and consequence. The game features a unique time management system that adds a layer of tension and urgency to the gameplay. The game also features a dual-form system that allows the player to switch between human and vampire forms, each with its own unique abilities and playstyle. The game is a must-play for fans of dark fantasy RPGs and players who enjoy games with strong narrative and gameplay elements.