Nighthawks review

Need to know

What is it?: A novel vampire RPG that's also a vampire novel's worth of great writing.
Expect to pay: TBA
Developer: The Curiosity Engine
Publisher: Wadjet Eye
Reviewed on: Windows 11, Intel Core i9, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060
Multiplayer?: No
Steam Deck: Unknown
Out: September 22
Link: Official site

Nighthawks is what you get if you take the masquerade out of Vampire: The Masquerade. It's a world where everyone knows vampires are real and therefore nobody has to bribe the police into pretending exsanguinated bodies aren't constantly turning up in back alleys.

Instead, you just have to bribe the police into saying somebody else did the exsanguination. Wasn't me, officer, must have been one of the other dozen people dressed entirely in black who you never see when the sun's up.

Nighthawks is a text-based RPG reminiscent of Fallen London or Citizen Sleeper. You select a location from a map, do a little choose-your-own-adventure when you get there, and test abilities based on traits that increase through use. To be initiated into a biker gang I had to walk to their bar naked, which bumped up my exhibitionist trait—which, when maxed out, will eventually increase both my seduction stat (which is good) and infamy (which is bad).

Because I used the sewers to get to the bar I also increased a trait that got me one notch closer to being able to fast-travel through said sewers. Bringing companions on quests increases their respect for me, fighting thugs on the street pushes up my brawling stat, and so on.

Fighting is a simple matter of watching vitality dribble away while punchy sounds play, all the while hoping I win the fight before my health finishes dripping out of my pants completely. More complicated fights involve multiple skill checks and choices like whether to fight dirty or pull back to recuperate—a bit like Esoteric Ebb though never as involved. Combat's not the focus, however. Despite the obligatory Fight Club questline, Nighthawks is an RPG that's more concerned with people than punching.

Character creation involves defining your background and vampire sire, as well as choosing a single power. Though the veil's been torn down and everyone knows vampires are real, their more supernatural traits have been kept on the down-low. People might be a bit surprised when you spring the ability to talk to corpses or turn into a shadow on them. It's a nice balance—the big revelation happened less than a decade ago, so vampires are still mysterious enough to most people that they won't know how every single rule works. Yes, I do need to be invited in. No, I don't know how it works either.

At the diner

The first act of Nighthawks is a detective story where I hunt a traitor across Cradlebridge—the world's first integrated city, where vampires are regulated, have ID cards, their own political committee, and a clinic that hands out watered-down blood. Later acts let you take part in the integration project, joining the community and becoming one of Cradlebridge's movers and shakers.

In addition to the expected 'which faction do I align with' stuff there are a huge amount of sidequests, which feel like taking breaks from an Anne Rice saga to read a Clive Barker short story.

Several of these bite-sized narratives are effective pieces of horror (the dollhouse will stick with me), others are more comedic or dramatic. I've adjudicated a dispute between rats who took over an abandoned theme park, and learned the life story of an elder vampire so I could host his funeral. It's funny when it tries to be funny and affecting when it tries to be affecting, and that's not common enough in videogame writing. There were several twists, and I didn't see any of them coming.

Every choice you make and location you travel to ticks down the time to sunrise, though I found myself with more free time than I needed. You could say that's a commentary on immortality, but it feels more like a consequence of having time limits but knowing that if those time limits are too strict players will revolt.

A couple of chapters gave me till the end of the month to wrap up relevant storylines, which was more time than I needed. I started out feeling pressured to squeeze in one more thing every night, rushing back home just as the sun rose at 6 am, and then realized there were 10 days to the climax of the act and I'd already wrapped up every sidequest.

Though you can just fast-forward to the end of the month at your sanctuary, the first time I tried that I was warned I'd miss out on two events in between. Yet instead of being able to fast-forward to those events I had to manually sleep through each day, which meant also manually getting some blood to keep the blood meter from getting too low, and it was all a bit of a chore.

I only drink whine

That blood meter is fairly easy to keep full, especially in later acts when you become a big deal and sources of blood, whether bottled or fresh and willing, are easier to turn up. There's also a predator meter to keep track of, which can only be partially slaked with cheap over-the-counter human bean juice. There's a part of every vampire that needs to stalk the night, and because I didn't pay attention to how full that meter was getting, at one point I woke from a fugue state with my fangs in the neck of a rapidly cooling corpse. Sorry, officer, won't happen again.

While Nighthawks lets you play nice with your food and has plenty of vampire characters who do their best to live among humans without conflict, it doesn't shy away from portraying the undead as monstrous. One of your companions is right up there with the most detestable characters in videogames, and I'm glad Nighthawks was self-aware enough to let me give him his eventual comeuppance. The ability vampires have to turn people into ghoulish thralls is horrifying, and Nighthawks doesn't skimp on the implications of that in particular.

After years of having hardly any vampire games to choose from we've had a handful more recently (apparently the ebb and flow of vampire fiction's popularity is a recession indicator), but don't skip Nighthawks just because other options are available. If you are at all into the idea of being a bloodsucking creature of the night it not only delivers on that fantasy, but interrogates it at the same time. Sure, it's cool to be angsty and wear sunglasses at night, Nighthawks says, but it is a bit weird we think this is so cool. What does that say about us, hey?

Nighthawks understands why we might want to pretend to be a vampire, but also takes the time to deconstruct that want, to make a solid case pointing out that vampires are traditionally the bad guys for a reason and also living forever would suck after a while. It let me enjoy being a bloodthirsty parasitic monster and then feel a bit grimy about enjoying it. Then I felt good about feeling a bit grimy because joke's on you, Nighthawks, I'm into that shit.

Disclosure: Richard Cobbett, writer and programmer of Nighthawks, is a former contributor to PC Gamer.