Every good deed in Vale Sangora has a price.
Several endings wait at the end of it, shaped by who he helped, who he fed on and who he left on the road, and one run of 30 to 40 hours will only show you a few of them. The Blood of Dawnwalker is out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, starting at Rs 3,999. It exists so that every afternoon handed to a stranger has been chosen over Coen’s family, and so the people you passed by stay passed by. Because nobody was ever really waiting on him, geralt could help every villager who asked.
The villages have paid a monthly blood tax ever since, most of them with the tired shrug of people who remember what came before. Coen’s household pays as well, while doing its best to hide a mother too ill to be of use to rulers who want their blood healthy. Brencis finds out, takes the family to be sacrificed at a feast a month away, and leaves Coen with a bite that turns him into a Dawnwalker, human by day and a vampire by night. Blood also serves as his health, and that is where the vampire starts sitting in on conversations. When it runs low at night, an option to give in to the hunger creeps into the dialogue, sliding around the list and flickering over the line you meant to choose. Let it fall far enough and Coen stops waiting for your input, feeding on whoever is in front of him, with no hint of whether that person held the key to a quest you had not found yet. By the halfway point I was hunting a deer before every meeting set after sunset, and Coen had eaten more venison than any one man should. Brencis spends the whole month in his castle at Svartrau, and there is nothing to stop you walking straight up to his gate on day one, beyond common sense. The realistic path runs through his three Boyars, Ambrus, Xanthe and Bakir, who handle his soldiers, his blood supply and the job of keeping the villages obedient. Hurting their operations raises Coen’s infamy, and Brencis answers with edicts that crowd the roads with guards. The surprise is how many people push back from the other side. Peasants paid to gather leeches for the vampires’ blood stores take up arms to protect their wages from the man who came to free them. A mother begs Coen to talk her son out of the fight before his squad is cut down. Inside the churches, the Vrakhiri run baptisms with blood and have painted themselves into the icons. For much of the valley, Brencis is the deal that kept them alive, and doing right by Coen’s family often means costing them something. Each Boyar gets a quest line that shows who they are before you decide whether to kill them or drain them completely. I killed two and drained Bakir mostly out of curiosity, at which point I was asked whether his spirit should rot or move into Coen’s head. He moved in, and spent the rest of my run offering commentary on my decisions. Allies ask for their share of the month too. Anca, the healer from Coen’s village, has secrets of her own, Lacra is a sharp-tongued vampire who keeps her reasons private, and Crake’s Manumits want Brencis dead without being entirely comfortable relying on a man with fangs. Each of them costs days, and each feels like a person with a life that carries on whether Coen shows up or not. I walked into Svartrau with time still left on the calendar, and I suspect most players will. The month was never meant to be impossible. Coen has to weigh each favour against his family, and after years of open-world RPGs where the main quest would wait forever, it is a real pleasure to play one where stopping for a stranger costs something. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
The first favours are where the thirty days start to feel real
Ciri is being hunted across dimensions for the entire length of The Witcher 3, and Geralt still finds time to track down a woman’s frying pan in White Orchard and lose a small fortune at Gwent. It comes from a studio set up by The Witcher 3’s director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, with plenty of his old colleagues in tow, and their fingerprints are everywhere, from the valley full of people making bad choices for understandable reasons to the glowing focus mode used to read crime scenes and a hunt, at one point, for a legendary silver sword. Even spending skill points takes time, which means learning a better sword technique leaves his family in Brencis’s cells a little longer.
It was the sort of errand I would have done without thinking in any other open-world RPG, and here it came with a price tag attached before I had even said yes. Nobody ever held it against him. Open-world RPGs have always run on a quiet arrangement where the story insists the world is ending, and the world politely waits while you clear every question mark on the map. Geralt keeps coming up in any conversation about The Blood of Dawnwalker, and for good reason. So it is striking that the first thing Dawnwalker does is tear up the arrangement Geralt enjoyed. Coen has thirty days to save his family, and every stranger he stops to help is paid for out of those thirty days. The man holding the family is Brencis, a vampire lord who did, to his credit, cure the plague. Vale Sangora, a Carpathian valley in the 14th century, was dying under a cruel king when Brencis and his clan, the Vrakhiri, got rid of the king and ended the sickness with their own blood. My first morning out of the prologue started with a man whose brother had fallen into the peat bogs. That price is the whole idea. Nothing moves while Coen wanders, loots cellars or chats to whoever will listen, but agreeing to a job pushes the calendar forward, and the cost is always shown upfront. A farmer with wolves in his field, a traveller with a problem on the road, a mother whose son’s tomb has been robbed: every one of them is a small withdrawal from a month that belongs to someone else. The mother is the one I still think about. A grave robber had taken her son’s silver necklace, silver being about the only thing that frightens the Vrakhiri, and she wanted it back. I found the thief easily enough, then let bigger quests pull me away, and by the time Coen had an afternoon to spare her quest had closed. The necklace sat in his inventory for the rest of my run, right next to the potions. What keeps all of this from turning bitter is how often a good deed comes back around. Someone helped on a muddy road will turn up in another town, hours later, in a quest that seemed to have nothing to do with them, holding exactly what Coen needs. There is never any telling which favours will return, so you keep doing them anyway. Nightfall changes who Coen is and what he can get away with. The peasant who spends his days bluffing past checkpoints and casting witchcraft paid for in his own blood becomes something that climbs walls, crosses rooftops in a blink and tears through soldiers with his claws. Every new vampiric power comes from feeding, whether on animals, people or other vampires, and his first meal is a handful of rats he describes as revolting, which is a fair review. A lot of problems in the valley have two answers depending on the hour. A negotiation that stalls in daylight can be settled far more bluntly at midnight, and some people will only meet him after the sun is down.