Nighthawks Lets You Eat Your Friends. Vampire RPGs Are Back
Nighthawks launches today, September 22, and the thing that immediately interests me is that it seems to understand something surprisingly few vampire games do.
Being a vampire should occasionally make you a terrible person.
Not because the story has decided you're tragically cursed. Not because an NPC calls you a monster while you spend the next six hours rescuing civilians. Nighthawks actually lets you feed on people, manipulate them, break into places, deal with black markets, bribe police and generally explore what happens when you give someone supernatural powers and then don't immediately surround those powers with health-and-safety barriers.
You can even kill and eat your companions.
Which feels like a fairly decisive answer to the question.
If Nighthawks has you wondering how many vampire RPGs actually let you behave like the problem, The Blood of Dawnwalker is next on the operating table. We dug into exactly how evil it really lets you become.
This isn't the vampire nightclub management game I first thought it was
Steam talks about building a nightclub empire, and I'll admit that immediately sent my brain somewhere else.
Staff. Money. Reputation. Suppliers. Maybe deciding whether to spend your profits on better speakers or finally replacing the bouncer who keeps eating customers.
That's not really what Nighthawks appears to be.
It's primarily a text-heavy narrative RPG. You move around Cradlebridge through a city map, visit locations, enter heavily written scenes, make choices, use skills, improve traits and decide what you can realistically get done before sunrise turns you into a particularly expensive ashtray.
There is combat, but it isn't the main attraction. The nightclub matters, but current evidence makes it look much more like an important part of your story and position in the city than some deep vampire-business simulator.
And actually, I think that's probably for the better. The more interesting bit isn't whether I can increase nightclub profit margins by 7%. It's what happens when the person running the nightclub can hypnotise people, drink their blood and murder Dave from bookkeeping because his character arc was becoming tiresome.
Nighthawks seems much more interested in that question.
The game actually trusts you with being horrible
This is where it gets interesting.
Crime games and villain games have a strange habit of wanting the fantasy right up until the player actually gets to participate in it.
You're an outlaw.
Excellent.
Now save this village.
You're an assassin.
Wonderful.
Here is an emotionally wounded child who needs twelve flowers collected.
You're supposedly the most feared criminal in the region, yet every game eventually finds a way to turn you into an unpaid municipal employee.
Nighthawks appears much less nervous about what you are.
Blood matters. Feeding matters. Your predatory urges matter. You can develop supernatural abilities including Mesmerism, which already raises the fairly obvious question of what consent, persuasion or even ordinary social interaction means when one person in the conversation can basically press the supernatural "agree with me" button.
Then there's the companion example.
Developer Richard Cobbett has confirmed that you can bring human companions back to your sanctuary, kill them and eat them.
And that's their story finished.
I love how brutally practical that is.
This character may have hopes. Trauma. Relationships. Fifteen thousand words of carefully written personal development waiting somewhere later in the game.
Unfortunately, you were hungry.
Narrative cancelled.
The fact that you can apparently choose not to do this is what makes it work for me. If the game forced every horrible action, then you're not really deciding what kind of vampire you are. You're just following the script while wearing fangs.
Give me the option to behave decently, though, and suddenly eating Steve becomes something I have to own.
Prefer your monster fantasy with less brooding and considerably more corpse-based entrepreneurship? Zombutcher turns being half-dead into an actual business model, because apparently capitalism survives the apocalypse too.
Being undead actually changes how you live
The approaching sunrise is probably the mechanic I'm most curious about.
Travelling around Cradlebridge and pursuing stories costs time. Eventually morning arrives, and vampires traditionally respond poorly to that development.
So every night becomes a small planning problem.
What do you do now? What can wait? Is this side story worth the time? Do you feed first? Do you take another risk because you're already nearby?
That's much more interesting than vampirism existing mainly as dialogue flavour.
The blood and predator systems push in the same direction. Being undead isn't just something your character mentions while everyone admires your cheekbones. It affects how you're allowed to exist in the city.
And Cradlebridge itself apparently isn't exactly Switzerland.
There are gangs, black markets, police corruption, break-ins and other criminal opportunities floating around the place.
Which means the game has taken an already crooked city and introduced people who can hypnotise humans.
That seems responsible.
Imagine ordinary organised crime discovering Mesmerism.
No forged documents. No elaborate bribery network. No associate called Tony who knows someone in licensing.
Just stare at the official for a moment.
"Everything seems to be in order, sir."
Thank you very much.
Civilisation lasted longer than expected.
The early reviews are encouraging, but calm down
The early response is positive.
PC Gamer gave Nighthawks 89/100, praising its writing, characters, horror stories and the way it handles the vampire fantasy, while criticising some of the time and blood-management busywork.
PixelByte gave it 8.5/10, with similar praise for the narrative, atmosphere and characters, although it found some progression roadblocks and sewer sections frustrating.
Rock Paper Shotgun was less enthusiastic and found the game's individual stories inconsistent.
So there is clearly something here.
But the game hasn't even had time to accumulate a meaningful Steam player consensus yet, which means declaring Nighthawks a modern vampire masterpiece today would be slightly premature.
There are still obvious questions.
Does the progression hold up?
Does the huge amount of writing remain interesting after the novelty wears off?
Do technical problems appear once thousands of normal players start doing things no reviewer thought to try?
And perhaps most importantly for a game boasting more than 800,000 words, does it remain a wonderfully deep RPG or eventually make you realise you've accidentally purchased an entire municipal library with blood mechanics?
We don't know yet.
Vampires are only one department in the company. See the games that actually let you become the criminal, monster, tyrant or absolute bastard everyone else normally spends the campaign trying to stop.
But the vampire fantasy already looks real
That is enough for now.
What caught my attention wasn't the nightclub, the enormous script or even the launch itself.
It's that Nighthawks appears willing to let vampirism have consequences.
You aren't just a person with supernatural abilities and a dietary issue. Feeding, predation, coercion and morally ugly decisions are part of what you can actually do.
You can choose restraint.
You can also solve a companion's unfinished storyline by eating them.
For a game about vampires, that feels strangely refreshing.
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