Rebel Wolves had an unenviable task with The Blood of Dawnwalker. Not only is this the studio’s debut, but its team includes numerous veterans of The Witcher 3, making comparisons to CD Projekt Red’s celebrated RPG almost inevitable. This potentially became even more problematic when a remaster of The Witcher 3 was announced just before this release. Thankfully, Dawnwalker isn’t content to simply imitate its predecessors. Instead, it takes what I would class as an underutilised vampire genre and delivers something truly special.
The Blood of Dawnwalker transports players to Vale Sangora, a fictional 14th-century region inspired by the Carpathian landscape. Here, vampires have seized control and ordinary people live beneath an oppressive new regime. You play as Coen, a young man transformed into a Dawnwalker who exists between humanity and vampirism, giving him extraordinary abilities but also forcing him to confront what he is becoming.
The story is easily one of the game’s greatest achievements. Rebel Wolves has created a cast of characters that are far more nuanced than the traditional heroes and villains you’d expect from a vampire tale. Alliances are rarely straightforward, decisions can have consequences that aren’t immediately obvious, and several quests demonstrate just how effectively the game can turn seemingly minor choices into memorable narrative moments.
What makes this particularly effective is the game’s unusual approach to time. Coen has just 30 days to save his family, and that countdown is constantly hanging over the adventure. Rather than simply completing every objective on a checklist, you’re encouraged to consider how you’re spending your limited time. Helping one character might mean abandoning another opportunity, while pursuing a particular objective can potentially alter what becomes available later.
It’s an ambitious system that gives the world a sense of urgency rarely found in open-world RPGs. It also means that a single playthrough won’t necessarily reveal everything Vale Sangora has to offer. The design actively encourages experimentation and replayability rather than expecting you to exhaust every piece of content in one journey.
Usually in games, a time mechanic would really put me off. With a world as rich as Dawnwalker’s you want to explore at your leisure. Thankfully that is not an issue here. You can travel the map to your hearts content without using up a moment of the 30 day window. Instead, advancing time is tied to missions and activities around the world. You have eight time segments for both day and night and the game makes it clear to you before you activate a mission, activity or upgrade that will use up some of this. That way you can choose if it is something you want to commit to.
Combat is another area where Dawnwalker embraces its premise. Coen’s abilities change depending on whether you’re playing during the day or at night, allowing the player to develop both his human and supernatural sides. Swordplay provides a solid foundation, while his vampiric powers add a more brutal dimension to encounters. Skill development also allows you to shape Coen according to your preferred approach.
The skill trees give Coen plenty of room to develop his abilities around your preferred playstyle, with progression divided between witchcraft, swordmastery and vampirism. Human-focused skills allow you to improve his combat capabilities and make him more effective with conventional weapons, while the vampire-oriented abilities lean into supernatural powers, giving Coen increasingly dangerous ways to deal with enemies. This dual-progression system works particularly well alongside the game’s day-and-night cycle, as you can invest in abilities that complement how you want to approach encounters. Many skills use up time to learn as well as skill points, so it is never possible to max everything out. This forces you to be picky and personalise your character to suit your needs.
Throughout the game, combat was a real standout for me. It uses a directional attack and parry system that felt so satisfying I found myself avoiding fast travel a lot of the time just so I could find more combat encounters. Attacks can be dealt from an up, down, left or right direction by holding the analog stick in that direction while delivering a blow. Similarly, an onscreen prompt shows you which direction an enemies attack is coming from and if you block while matching that direction you’ll pull off a parry that leaves them open to your next attack. It reminded me of Kingdom Come Deliverance II, but executed with much more weight.
Visually, The Blood of Dawnwalker is frequently stunning. The grim medieval settlements, dense forests, ruined structures and imposing vampire architecture create an incredible sense of place. Night-time exploration is particularly effective, with lighting and environmental detail transforming familiar locations into far more threatening spaces. Unreal Engine 5 helps create some genuinely impressive scenes, although the game isn’t technically immaculate.
There are occasional visual glitches, pop in, stiff facial animations and performance inconsistencies that remind you this is the first game from a new studio. These imperfections are noticeable, but they rarely undermine the overall presentation. The art direction does much of the heavy lifting, while the soundtrack and strong voice performances complement the oppressive atmosphere beautifully.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about The Blood of Dawnwalker is that it understands the value of restraint. This isn’t an RPG that needs to bury you under hundreds of meaningless icons or endless side activities. Its best moments come from following characters, investigating strange situations and discovering stories that feel as though they exist independently of the player.
For all its occasional mechanical roughness, it’s an extraordinarily accomplished debut. Its narrative ambition, memorable characters, atmospheric world and clever time-management mechanics combine to create something that feels substantially more distinctive than its obvious influences might suggest. Rebel Wolves has delivered a dark fantasy adventure that understands what makes this genre so compelling while introducing enough of its own ideas to stand apart.
The Blood of Dawnwalker doesn’t just have the blood of The Witcher running through its veins. It has the confidence to forge its own identity, and in doing so it has delivered one of my favourite RPGs in recent memory. Rebel Wolves have spoken about wanting to create more games in this universe and I couldn’t be more excited for the next entry. If this is what a first attempt looks like, we could be on the verge of one of gaming’s next great franchises.
-Craig 🧐
