Aside from the admittedly low-energy investigative gameplay at the start, Rebel Wolves’ The Blood of Dawnwalker is a pretty choice-heavy game. Each choice ripples out in different ways, whether you’re helping the rebels deal with Brencis and his crew, or going on your own feeding frenzy at night. But what if the player ends up in an unwinnable situation?
How does the development team prevent you from entering a so-called fail state by, say, killing all the NPCs? As director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz succinctly explained to Game Informer, “We don’t. The game – this is a role-playing game. It’s about player role. If you want to play like this or if it happens, you decide if you want to reload the game or go with the flow and see what happens.”
While most games would like to keep you along a specific path, Tomaszkiewicz believes that these kinds of results are “really interesting.” “They are changing your experience – you cannot predict them, and if they happen, you need to adjust, to adapt to what happens and to change your strategy to finish the game, and I think that it’s really funny to observe how people play it.”
He also enjoys hearing how people compare their “emotions and experiences” and argue about “what is the best way you know to complete something.” The studio’s goal is to deliver “so many different experiences for people that they can go back, replay it again and have an almost different game than what they think.”
Whether you’re in for a single playthrough or going back to check alternate routes, The Blood of Dawnwalker is a pretty hefty game, requiring around 50 hours on average to complete. It’s also worth noting that the story doesn’t immediately end when the 30 in-game days are up, with Rebel Wolves teasing that the circumstances “will change.”
Launching on September 3rd, The Blood of Dawnwalker will be available for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. The development team also has plans for “smaller, free add-ons”, though further details and a roadmap remain to be revealed.
