Vampire: Prelude

The game must have crashed fatally on me or something, because all progress was lost and the only remaining option was to restart. I won’t (at this time anyway), but this is a report on the game as far as I got.

I’m talking about the Vampire: Prelude, a story-based game set in the same universe as the classic action RPG Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines.

It’s an interactive fiction, so it’s a story where you get to make some decisions on how things will unfold, and there are some fail states as well (i.e. you can choose wrongly and die prematurely.)

It’s a coming-of-age story of sorts, except the transition is from human to vampire. The story’s protagonist, Case, has just been turned, but left to his own devices to figure it all out. The crash locked me out of most of the game, but what little I got to experience seemed pretty okay. The subject matter is interesting though maybe not terribly original (isn’t even Interview with the Vampire basically a coming-of-age story.)

More unusual is that the entire game (apparently) is played through a cell phone, mostly texting but also the occasional picture (as far as I got.) It’s not that the character doesn’t act or that there aren’t any events, it’s just that these are mediated through texting, some of which you get to decide yourself.

What are those decisions? They range from trivial to substantial, and as an example of the latter there is early in the game a fork in the road where you get to decide whether to go to Seattle or New York, and you do so by simply telling your friend where you’re going. I hear, though, that these two possible paths are conjoined later by having the character in both cases returning to the original place, a choke point progression wise. So maybe that choice of destination (while still being substantial) doesn’t in fact change the entire game the way one might initially assume, depending on the ramifications of the events that transpire while being away. I’d have to play it both ways to know. Heck, now I’m getting curious and starting to feel like delineating the various paths and endings (presumably there is more than one valid ending) but nah, I’m neck deep in games awaiting, and there’s the risk of another crash to consider. Maybe later.

It’s available on both tablet and smartphone (and on something called a “PC”), but I recommend going smartphone to make it feel more authentic, like real texting. Probably the only game I’ve come across that’s clearly better on a smartphone.