The Blood of Dawnwalker: How Evil Can You Actually Be?
- Niels Gys
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Yes, The Blood of Dawnwalker lets you behave like a proper vampire bastard.
You can feed on people, kill important NPCs, embrace increasingly vampiric powers and make decisions that permanently alter relationships, quests and who survives your particular interpretation of family rescue.
There is, however, one enormous fang-shaped catch: the game gives you considerably more freedom to act like a monster than it gives you reasons to become one.
And that makes its evil play simultaneously fascinating and slightly toothless.
Want another game that actually makes being a monster somebody else's problem? Head into our Playable Villains coverage, where morality is optional and HR stopped answering weeks ago.
You Can Absolutely Become the Problem
Coen is a Dawnwalker, human by day and vampire by night, and this is not one of those RPGs where “embrace your dark side” means selecting the rude dialogue option before continuing the exact same quest.
At night, the rules change.
Coen gains supernatural abilities including enhanced movement, claws and feeding. Biting enemies restores health, while embracing vampiric corruption unlocks additional powers.
More importantly for anyone who sees “vampire RPG” and immediately starts wondering how quickly the Geneva Convention can be adapted for 14th-century Carpathia, feeding is not restricted to designated villains.
You can drain ordinary people.
You can drain important people.
You can kill NPCs whose continued possession of blood, organs and a functioning pulse might have been useful to the story later.
That matters because Dawnwalker is built around consequences. Characters can die. Alliances can change. Questlines can disappear because of decisions made elsewhere. Brencis and his forces also react to your interference through the Infamy system, with escalating measures including hostile patrols and edicts.
So yes, you can save your family while behaving in ways that would make your family seriously reconsider whether rescue is still the preferred outcome.
“Coen! You came for us!”
“I did.”
“Where's Father Gregor?”
“Long story.”
“Why is there blood on your shirt?”
“Shorter story.”
The Best Evil Is The Evil You Choose
This is where Dawnwalker gets genuinely interesting.
You are not simply choosing between GOOD ENDING and EVIL ENDING while the game quietly changes the colour of your bedroom curtains.
Its 30-day structure means meaningful actions consume time. Major quests, important decisions and learning certain abilities advance the clock, while ordinary exploration does not.
That turns morality into something nastier than a morality meter.
Time has value.
People have value.
Information has value.
Your family is waiting while you decide what deserves your attention.
The game therefore creates opportunities for selfishness without always hanging a giant red EVIL sign above them. A decision can close another possibility. Someone surviving can depend on what you did elsewhere. Helping everybody is difficult when the calendar is essentially standing behind you holding a clipboard and tapping its watch.
It is a lovely framework for monstrous roleplay because evil does not have to mean randomly eating the postman.
Sometimes evil is simply deciding that somebody else's tragedy has failed the quarterly review.
Dawnwalker gives you fangs. CRIMENET has an entire Crime Games rabbit hole for when drinking Steve no longer satisfies the urge to make terrible decisions.
Unfortunately, Being A Vampire Is Almost Too Convenient
Here comes the coffin lid to the face.
The freedom to behave monstrously is real. The pressure to behave monstrously appears much weaker.
One of the sharpest criticisms emerging from completed playthroughs is that Dawnwalker does not make feeding on innocents particularly necessary. Coen is not constantly staggering through villages desperately searching for a neck because his supernatural metabolism has started flashing the petrol light.
Feeding on enemies can restore health. Corruption unlocks additional vampire abilities. Yet the darker path apparently lacks the kind of painful systemic downside that could turn vampirism into an actual moral struggle.
That is a massive missed opportunity.
Imagine giving the player the ability to drain crucial NPCs, then making blood hunger severe enough that keeping everybody alive becomes difficult.
Now every conversation at night has another participant.
Hunger.
That friendly merchant is no longer merely a merchant. He is also approximately five litres of poor decision-making wearing trousers.
Dawnwalker gives you the trousers. It gives you the teeth. It even lets you commit the poor decision.
It just doesn't always make you desperately want to.
That distinction matters.
Vampyr Had The Crueller Idea
The obvious comparison is Vampyr, because that game understood something beautifully horrible about vampire roleplay: temptation becomes interesting when murder is useful.
Its moral tension came from making innocent people valuable both alive and dead. Killing somebody was not simply a roleplaying flourish. The game could make predation mechanically attractive, then ask whether you were willing to become worse in exchange for power.
Dawnwalker appears more permissive.
That sounds better until you realise permission and temptation are completely different things.
Being told, “You may eat Steve” is freedom.
Being told, “Steve knows where your sister is, sells excellent equipment and has enough blood inside him to turn you into Dracula with a mortgage approval” is a dilemma.
Dawnwalker has built a wonderfully reactive RPG structure around time, consequences and NPC mortality, yet its vampire systems seem strangely reluctant to weaponise all three against your conscience.
There is a magnificent bastard of a game hiding inside that interaction.
Occasionally, you can see its cape sticking out.
Still hungry? Our Horror Games coverage has more creatures, killers and catastrophically poor survival decisions waiting downstairs. Naturally, we're going downstairs.
So How Evil Can You Actually Be?
Pretty damn evil.
The Blood of Dawnwalker allows genuine monster roleplay. Coen can feed on humans, kill consequential NPCs, deepen his vampiric abilities and make decisions capable of changing relationships, closing quests and leaving people dead.
This is not cosmetic villainy.
The disappointment is that the game does not always make vampirism itself consequential enough. The world can care deeply about what Coen does while seemingly caring less than it should about the fact that Coen occasionally treats the population as Capri-Sun with employment.
If your question is simply whether Dawnwalker lets you play the monster, the answer is yes.
If your question is whether it forces you to wrestle with becoming one, the answer is much less satisfying.
The teeth are real.
The tragedy is that the game doesn't always make you hungry enough to use them.
FAQ
Can you be evil in The Blood of Dawnwalker?
Yes. Coen can feed on humans, kill important NPCs and make choices that can change relationships, affect alliances and close off questlines. The game gives you meaningful freedom to behave like a monster rather than limiting evil choices to dialogue.
Can you kill NPCs in The Blood of Dawnwalker?
Yes. As a vampire, Coen can drain and kill NPCs, including characters who may be important to quests. Killing people can therefore have consequences beyond simply getting blood or restoring health.
Do you have to drink human blood in The Blood of Dawnwalker?
Not generally. Feeding can restore health, but the game does not constantly force Coen to hunt innocent humans to survive. Enemies and other sources can reduce the pressure to prey on civilians, which is one reason the vampire morality system can feel less demanding than the premise suggests.
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