Next month sees the release of Rebel Wolves’ vampiric action-RPG, The Blood of Dawnwalker.  It’s a game that I’m looking forward to, especially after playing a four-hour preview.

Bandai Namco invited me to check out a PC preview build of The Blood of Dawnwalker over at their Sydney office. I got to play through the game’s lengthy prologue, which introduced the protagonist, Coen, his family, his fellow villagers, and the rather awful situation they find themselves in. As if the Black Death marching through medieval Europe wasn’t enough, a posse of vampires has taken over the region.

Each full moon, the adult villagers must attend blood mass, where they must donate their blood to the vampires. The villagers are safe as long as they are useful. Unfortunately, Coen’s mother is suffering from an affliction that, should the vampires realise that she is unwell, will mean her end.

To remedy this, I was charged with a mission to visit Anka, a woman in the village who has been teaching Coen Latin. She also seems to be more than meets the eye. From Anka, I receive a recipe for a concoction to calm Coen’s mother. At the time, I didn’t realise that I was supposed to remember the number of ingredients I was to use, so I had to play it by ear and hope for the best.

Entering the church for the blood mass, I was met with the body of another character I’d interacted with earlier, strung up in the church rafters, her usefulness obviously expired. I got the distinct feeling that her death was unnecessary and that I could perhaps have thwarted it. What happened next was most definitely on me.

I’d obviously made a mistake in preparing Coen’s mother’s potion. Rather than sit quietly, the poor woman becomes hysterical, culminating in her demise. Having seen videos of Coen’s mother hostage, later on in the game, I can only surmise that if my memory were better, she would have survived the encounter.

After the blood mass, Coen confronts Brencis, the lead vampire, and they fight. But instead of dying from what the vampire lord intended to be mortal wounds, Coen survives, becoming the titular Dawnwalker.

The game feels very much like The Witcher 3. As with Geralt’s adventures, The Blood of Dawnwalker, grounds itself in an otherwise ordinary, well-realised medieval world, but injected with a supernatural element to make things interesting. The similarities between The Blood of Dawnwalker and The Witcher 3 are hardly surprising, considering the game’s director and many of the developers worked on both.

With the village in ruins, Coen is given 30 days to save his family. This is a game that doesn’t pull its punches, asking hard decisions of players as they negotiate their path as a human and as a vampire.

All the missions in the game vary in the length of time they take to complete. These are set times. You could spend all day (in real time) messing around, but once the mission is finished, whatever time the game allotted to that task is added to the in-game clock. It may be that other tasks are now no longer available to you. Time may pass, turning day into night, Coen’s human form switching to that of a Dawnwalker.

The mission system has me sitting on the fence, to be honest. Part of me thinks it’s inspired, offering another layer of strategy to the game, but will it become restrictive as the game progresses?

The two very different ways that the game plays could be a problem if you favour one over the other. During the day, Coen fights in a manner that feels like a more refined version of the melee combat inKingdom Come: Deliverance. By night, as a Dawnwalker, Coen can take guards by surprise, supping on their blood, and chaining attacks using his vampiric powers. In the early game, I found both to be fun ways to play, but I’m not sure how this balance persists later in the game.

The preview ended by offering up a glimpse of the scale of the game, which promises to be epic.

Even as a pre-release preview build, The Blood of Dawnwalker felt polished from the combat to the storytelling. The world felt alive, making the fate of Coen’s village even more poignant. And I can’t wait to return to Veil Sangora when the game launches on 3 September.