Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a story-driven role-playing game made by Big Bad Wolf, a studio within Cyanide, and published by Nacon. It launched on May 19, 2022, for Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, and a Nintendo Switch version was also released. The game draws on White Wolf’s tabletop role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade and belongs to the wider World of Darkness series.

The game takes place in present-day Boston, in a world where vampires secretly live alongside humans and the Camarilla sect enforces the Masquerade, the rule that keeps their existence hidden. Hazel Iversen, the new Prince of Boston, is working to unite the Boston and Hartford domains. When a violent attack strikes the Camarilla, three vampires who are each around a century old are drawn into an investigation of who was behind it: Galeb of clan Ventrue, Emem of clan Toreador, and Leysha of clan Malkavian.

Play moves between the three protagonists over the course of the story. Each has a separate set of vampiric disciplines and character statistics, and points spent on them shape how conversations go and which skills are available while exploring, such as picking locks or hacking computers. Because the characters are often among humans, using supernatural powers in the open risks breaking the Masquerade. Dialogue checks pit a character’s skills against others, and the Hunger for blood must be managed along the way.

Choices sit at the center of the design, and many situations offer no clearly right answer. Decisions affect the fate of each protagonist and of the Boston Camarilla, and the story has a number of possible endings depending on which characters survive and what actions were taken. The investigation eventually leads to vampire hunters from the Society of St. Leopold and a government group known as the Special Affairs Division.

Swansong was announced in May 2019 and shown at PDXCON in October 2019, with Clément Plantier as designer. It adapts the fifth edition of the tabletop game and reworks the Boston setting from older sourcebooks for a modern setting. Planned for 2021, it was delayed to February 2022 and then to May 2022, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Review aggregator Metacritic rated it as having “mixed or average” reviews, with critics crediting its lore and freedom of choice while faulting its writing, puzzles, and technical polish.