Here's a thing about me: I loved Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York, the sequel to 2019's good-but-not-great visual novel Coteries of New York. Its blend of excellent art, a killer soundtrack, and writing that—so far as I'm concerned—captured the true, stifling horror of the World of Darkness struck me so hard that it inspired my first-ever published piece of games writing, effectively putting me where I am today.
So it's a game with a profound and special place in my heart, which meant when its follow-up, Reckoning of New York, dropped last week, I rushed to get my hands on it. Draw Distance gets the World of Darkness—particularly its modern variant—like few other devs can, and I was eager to see how it wrapped up its trilogy.
The answer, I'm sorry to say, is underwhelmingly. I've not hit Reckoning of New York's end yet, but I've seen enough to call it a step back from everything that still makes Shadows of New York one of my favourite games. Music, art, and—most fatally of all—writing: It's all just a bit worse than it was when the studio was firing on all cylinders back in 2020.
Damned if you do
Where Coteries led you choose between three clans and Shadows put you in the shoes of Julia—member of the Lasombra, the vampiric clan of shadows, Reckoning has you play (on your first playthrough) a Ravnos named Kali. The Ravnos tend to be vagabonds and tricksters, a clan largely uninterested in the internecine politicking that defines vampiric sects like the Camarilla and Sabbat. Kali is no different, making her unliving as a smuggler on the outskirts of polite society. Her only haven is a tooled-up RV, and her only connections are her sire and their coterie of petty vampire crooks.
Kali is the first problem I had with Reckoning of New York. She's, well, insufferable. Tastes vary, of course—plenty of players didn't like the heavily millennial-coded protagonist of Shadows, who I related to on an almost mystical level—but it sometimes feels like every third thing out of Kali's mouth is a bizarre quip or non-sequitur pop-culture reference. It can feel like you're playing a deathless, hemophagic version of Señorita Awesome from that one viral TV show clip.
Which is a tad annoying, but even worse, it ends up undercutting a lot of the suffocating vibe that Draw Distance nailed so well in its previous games. I loved Shadows in part because it brilliantly captured Julia's dawning realisation that her embrace of unlife meant trading human systems of oppression and exploitation for vampiric ones—and that all the superpowers that came with it didn't mean squat compared to the accumulated centuries of political power her masters exercised. She was a metaphorical and literal sucker. It was, well, horrifying.
It all deflates as soon as Kali starts referring to her interlocutors as things like "gothed-out Ally McBeal"
Kali's existence is not horrifying. It could be. After all, one of the first things that happens in the game is her trial—with a likely punishment of death—before a court of New York's most powerful and amoral leeches. That's scary! That's a scary thing to happen to a person! But it all deflates as soon as Kali starts referring to her interlocutors as things like "gothed-out Ally McBeal". It's difficult to maintain the tension of a scene when your hero is treating the whole thing like a lost Marx brother.
Which she does frequently. Most situations give you a choice of three responses, at least one of which is invariably sarcastic (sometimes all three), but I'm not sure they make much difference. In my time with the game I've never really felt like my choices were making much of an impression. Instead they colour the tone of the lines immediately responding to what I said before the story aggressively locks back into its set path. I wouldn't mind so much—Shadows was much the same way, with only about five or so dialogue options actually impacting the game—but I don't have a ton of investment in that story and its heroine so far.
The good news is that finishing the story as Kali unlocks a second playthrough, as the clanless Anarch Pádraic, who figures heavily into Kali's story and is—at least outwardly—less prone to off-brand Peter Parker behaviour. I've not yet unlocked him, though, so I can't comment on how much his playthrough redeems the game.
It's not just the protagonist, though. Reckoning's writing as a whole seems clunkier, a bit less elegant than the fare you found in the last two games. There's more purple prose, more lines that take too long to say too little, and more dialogue that doesn't sound like anything a person would actually say. None of these flaws are new—it's difficult to write an entire visual novel without the occasional duff quip—but they're more prominent and more aggravating here.
For art's sake
Say what you like about Coteries and Shadows of New York, but they oozed style, despite consisting, in essence, of a sequence of drawings. Characters like Sophie Langley and Thomas Arturo oozed haughty imperiousness that befitted their social station, while the settings and backdrops were all lonely, haunted, sprawling, gothic.
Reckoning's backdrops are still dandy, but I'm not so sure about the character art. It still looks good, but Draw Distance has added minute elements of animation to them that weren't there before (or at least, that weren't so noticeable). Hands hover, heads wobble, characters softly gyrate up and down as they cackle and threaten. I suppose it's intended, ironically, to give the impression of life, but it's done in such a way that it kind of makes them feel more uncanny than anything. You can see the centres of gravity each point of animation pivots around.
But I'm most upset about the soundtrack. Like I said, Shadows had an absolutely killer OST from the band Resina, one that I still regularly listen to today. It was moody and oppressive and prominent and perfect, properly embodying the goth vibes of the World of Darkness. Reckoning's, by contrast, is just… there. It's a bit of light tinkling that underscores a scene and which exits your brain almost as soon as it enters it. It's a real disappointment, especially since I was hoping—if nothing else—to get a new album to add to my collection out of a new VtM game.
What I reckon of New York
So, yes, my time so far with Reckoning of New York has been a disappointment. Unless my Pádraic playthrough totally redeems it (in which case expect a follow-up article), it seems by far the weakest of Draw Distance's VtM trilogy so far. Where previous entries—even the imperfect Coteries—blended art, music, and writing in a way that absolutely nailed the stifling horror vibes of the World of Darkness, Reckoning seems unable to resist undercutting itself at every turn. I'm still eager to see what Draw Distance does next, the studio is more than capable of turning in great stuff, but it seems like this trilogy has gone out with a whimper rather than a bang.
