The Haunted Hoard: Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York (PS4)

While becoming a vampire can sometimes be portrayed as romantic or a way to open up a whole new world of powers, there is a horror element to it that extends beyond the potential ennui of eternal life. Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York is a visual novel where you are a freshly turned vampire experiencing the change and shift in lifestyle, and through its first-person perspective it does a lot to emphasize the pain of a new hunger for blood and the radical lifestyle shift that comes with it.

 

First, the player gets to pick one of three representative characters for their story, the characters meant to represent the different clans found in the broader Vampire: the Masquerade series. While there are many parts of the narrative that will be similar across the three characters, they do have former lives that influence their thoughts and specific events. The Toreador character was an artist before their turn for example, sometimes more poetically describing the feelings of anguish over the coming shifts from mortal to immortal. The Ventrue however worked in the business world, and while she wasn’t fond of the life, she does have quite the different perspective than the Toreador or the partygoer Brujah. Much of the introductory sections of the game focus in on the life you’re leaving behind with a few later events or comments still expressing that history, but Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York does feel designed so much of the story can be experienced no matter who you choose to start as, thinning some of the reason to replay the game before you factor in other elements like time restrictions and possible failed interactions.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York always starts with your character being turned into a vampire and quickly picked up by a vampire group known as the Camarilla. While you are eased into your early transition, you soon must prove yourself useful or you will be summarily executed, the masquerade that keeps regular humans from knowing about the bloodsuckers among them too vital to let disruptive or disobedient vampires to run free. Luckily, you are taken under the wing of a woman named Sophie Langley eager to cultivate you into a vampire of note, the vampiress encouraging you to start building up a group of like-minded vampires known as a coterie. The introductory segments lean a lot into your character’s angst over the transition and the overwhelming nature of being thrust out of one society and into another one, although this visual novel’s choice system does allow you to resist or rebel a little along the way, provided you don’t push too far and get executed before the plot even gets going. Building your coterie is where your choices really start to matter most though, as there are four characters of note you can try to befriend while there are also side activities that crop up along the way that can further demand your attention. Most nights you only have one or two activities you can engage with and the main plot involving the Camarilla will sometimes demand your attention while also wrapping up before you can conceivably do every available activity.

 

Therefore, your path through Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York is up for you to decide. The four coterie candidates are definitely the most developed activities and they all do a pretty good job of showing you another side of this secret society. Working with the self-styled detective D’Angelo shows you the underside of the community as you brush up against the phenomena of thin-bloods, a type of vampire that is a pariah even within this hidden society. Meanwhile with Hope though, you see a vampiress who tries to interact more with the modern world through modern technologies like the internet and even things like Deepfake software. While these do a great job of introducing more concepts about this world, the game doesn’t forget to make characters out of these potential companions, the narrative of someone like Agathon both introducing you to the blood magic of the Tremere clan while you’re also working to thaw the reclusive vampire into opening up about his tragic past. The side stories that can crop up as other optional activities can explore instead smaller ideas like how a vampire might try to marry their old religious thoughts with their new life or focus in on the efforts made to keep up the masquerade, but it is likely before the plot ends you’ll get in two coterie tales in full and then possibly some side story exploration, incentivizing another playthrough to get the rest.

One other element that appears across all stories is your need to feed. At certain points, the option to feed on a bystander can come up, and keeping your thirst at bay can influence your activities in a few ways. The three different playable vampires all have unique powers, and at certain junctures you can utilize these skills so long as you are well-fed. You might have something like heightened senses simplify a search, super speed that lets you simplify a chase or avoiding danger, or the ability to charm or dominate someone by increasing your charisma. If you ignore feeding for too long, you can even be forced to spend time hunting down an innocent person to feast, although Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York does contextualize blood drinking as something that the victim forgets ever happened thanks to a surge of bliss the vampire can induce so long as they’re in control of their faculties. This does ease up a bit on the potential horror of being a vampire in a game that otherwise happily embraces that aspect, but it does skirt a potential moral issue that could have been a hang up for some players. Funnily enough though, you don’t need to feed as much as you might imagine, which can be a blessing since some storylines don’t offer many feeding chances at all and there’s no way to look for potential targets otherwise.

 

Your main impact on the plot beyond the larger choices of which stories to pursue will be the dialogue choices made during these activities. There are usually three responses you can make when prompted, but sometimes these will just allow you to ask simple questions or don’t really impact things. One nice element is the game includes a dictionary you can consult any time for quick explanations of key terms, the words added as they come up so the game doesn’t get mired in trying to keep you up to speed on keyphrases all the time. You also can easily review recent dialogues quite easily, but Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York has a very strict save system that tries to add stakes to things but can also make replaying the game to see alternate routes more difficult. The game will automatically save after almost every dialogue box and while you can have three save files, they are kept completely separate. You cannot reload if you made a choice and want to see the alternate path, and the developers have even said this is meant to add weight to your decisions. This does make interacting with potential coterie members a bit more tense. The different characters respond to different approaches, so Tamika whose Gangrel clan more readily embraces the beastly side of being a vampire is more likely to respond to forceful behavior, yet being too forceful can just make you look like an overconfident jerk in her eyes. It can be difficult to maintain that balance during the testier moments, a whole storyline potentially blocked off if you make the wrong choice, and while there is a skip feature so you can quickly get past all the text to try again, it still takes much longer than just reloading an earlier save would have.

 

One odd thing about the weight in your decisions though is how the ending doesn’t seem to shift much based on what you’ve done. Sure, the coterie you’ve built has a nominal presence, but it still feels like the plot mostly wraps up identically no matter what you do and what’s more, it feels like it has snipped the story a bit short and with a rather unsatisfying payoff to a lot of the build-up laid out earlier. It is fortunate that the coterie candidates then have their own self-contained stories not contingent on the broader rumblings in the vampire underworld of New York, there still some satisfying tales to experience along the way and with some lovely art to accompany them. Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York features no voice-acting and animation is mostly limited to the vivid backgrounds sometimes having a moving light or computer screen, but the character art is especially stylish and moody, a wonderful fit for the vampire tale while also knowing when to steep some things in grit for the less scrupulous parts of NYC. It can perhaps be a little still at times though, the detailed art meaning there are less alternate poses or expressions for characters, but the writing does do a good job of giving unique voices and personality quirks to the major cast members to make them feel more layered.

THE VERDICT: Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York does an excellent job steeping you into a first-person narrative about how becoming a vampire would utterly change your life, and the four stories tied to building your coterie further explore vampire society and the specific characters rather well. Unfortunately, the main plot feels a little confused as it always culminates in a singular ending that undervalues your input and feels a poor wrap-up for the building tension. Other ideas like feeding and using your powers may be more mild successes and it’s a shame the save system couldn’t be a touch more accommodating, but a lot of the immersive writing and compelling smaller stories are let down by having to give way to a main story that wraps up with a poor finish.

 

And so, I give Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York for PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. The well-realized early segments involving your character’s traumatic shift into a vampire and their sense of isolation after having to reject their old life plus the four coterie recruiting stories are let down a bit too much by the main plot feeling oddly disconnected from them. It outright demands your attention at points, interrupting your ability to engage with the other storylines, only to wrap up with something more interested in twists than payoffs. It’s not an utterly disastrous finale, it does feel like the game is trying to make a point with its unexpected swerves, but it also feels like it plays into none of the game’s strengths and makes others look a bit hollow. Even if many of your choices don’t shift the main narrative though, thankfully the sidestories and time you spend with other vampires like Hope and D’Angelo are meaningful in their own contexts, helping to buoy the experience and still leave you with something satisfactory that won’t be tarnished by the odd finale. Keeping them mostly self-contained means they are worth experiencing, and like the introductory segments, they do a lot to steep you into the fascinating setting that the Vampire: The Masquerade series has created. The dictionary keeps you up to speed rather fluidly and distinct characters help contextualize things well after you’re given the definition of crucial terms and clans, and they usually go beyond mere introduction into actually examining some potential quandary this lifestyle can lead to.

 

I try to not let weak endings overly tint my view on a game as certain experiences can be excellent up until a shaky finale, but in this visual novel, the main narrative does demand enough attention that it’s path is important to consider. If it only interjected after you’ve had your fun experiencing the different sidestories and coterie recruitment missions for its rough landing it could be easier to wave off, but it wants to work on its build up quite a bit and that pulls attention away from its stronger approach to the shorter stories. Even when those wrap up in unexpected ways, they feel like a natural evolution or they take the time to address it properly. Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York has a lot of talent on show in terms of writing and art but its structure and focus sometimes pulls you away from the best examples of it.