BloodLust Shadowhunter - Vampire/World of Darkness Meets Diablo

Hey guys, I found out about this game thanks to amandachen in the Little Indie Games Worth Knowing About (Probably) thread, and even though I rarely buy games that aren’t on sale, the promise of randomly generated dungeons with a Vampire: The Masqueraide/Diablo feel to it was just too good to pass up.

It’s basically made by one guy using the Unreal engine, and you get to choose between two different types of vampire (full or half-human), three different classes (warrior, witch or thief) and then are basically let loose in this amazingly fun underworld. Not only do you have quests to do, you can align yourself with various houses and even sire your own army of followers. The RPG system is pretty good too, allowing you to choose new skills and talents as you level up, and these are different depending on your class and even the playthrough, as I think the talent trees are randomized. The combat is fast-paced and fun, and the game rewards exploration with hidden rooms you can find through breakable walls, switches you can throw via your vampiric sight power or even high jumping to a nearby ledge, for example. There’s also a lot of great loot I’ve found so far.

So far is it SO FUN. It’s got just the right amount of fast-paced combat, randomness, variety of quests and things to do and so on to keep me coming back. It’s so, SO worth $13, so check it out! :)

Back in March, Jim Sterling looked at this, and back then it looked kind of terrible.

YMMV, things may have changed since March, etc.

Why did it look terrible? Even he said he’s charmed by it.

This looks pretty interesting, please keep us updated Brian. Any info regarding length and/or replayability would be very welcome.

Also, the game gets a few bonus points from me for not being in Early Access. Such a rarity these days.

It just left early access, actually, which is how I became aware of it. My first playthrough lasted a couple of hours before I was killed by some werewolves, and I felt like I barely scratched the surface, so I’ll keep you apprised.

I’m aware of that. It’s just that most of the games that get highlighted on forums these days turn out to be in EA which is always a major downer for me. Seeing one that’s actually finished (more or less) is a nice change from that.

I’m always curious: are these one-man games relying heavily on contracted art/sound, or making use of free/low-cost pre-made stuff? Or are these guys just multi-talented auteurs capable of coding, writing, composing, performing, texturing, modeling, and animating (obviously with varying degrees of proficiency)?

Cuz the latter just seems batshit crazy to me. I’m not gonna pretend that this or even Banished are necessarily beautiful by any means, but despite my being a reasonably un-terrible writer and learning the basics of coding, if you plopped me down in front of Photoshop and asked me to produce a 500x500 texture that could be wrapped over a 3-dimensional representation of a windowsill and have it, in the end, be recognizable as a windowsill, I’d be at a complete fucking loss.

Looks interesting, except I just played a vampire-themed ARPG (Van Helsing II) and also I think I might be pretty burned out on the ARPG formula in general.

I’ll keep an eye on the thread though, in case there’s a future lost classic here.

Sound is often contracted or open source at least. I remember two games I loved last year using the exact same music track in parts of their game.

So I’ve been stuck in the same dungeon for a while, and that’s because this game does something a biiiit different that is both frustrating and lovely:

The doors back up to the start of the dungeon/tutorial level, where I started, and necessarily on the first level.

Three levels now and I’ve not found the stairs back. It’s kind of maddening, but in a fun, exciting and tense way. I wanna get back so I can sell all the sweet loot I’ve been finding, but can’t yet, so I have to make choices as to what to keep, what to try and feed on since my blood is running out and so on.

It’s pretty damned awesome.

I’ve gotten down to level 15 on the ruins dungeon. The dungeoneering reminds me of Baroque in some respects.

It’s a pretty cool little game, but it needs a Loot 2.0-style design pass. And the designer’s point-n-click adventure experience really shows – up to and including pixel hunts (looking for openings to pass your ‘gaze’ through).

Sequel has been announced: BloodLust 2: Nemesis.

http://www.bloodlust-shadowhunter.com/nemesis/

Good, good. Hopefully, the guy doing this has sat down and had a hard think about streamlining the loot system, and has learned enough from the first game to not repeat those “oops, this is my first game so plz forgive me” design stumbles.

Oh yay! I really loved what I played of the original, until I got stuck and gave up.

To be fair, the guy has made a lot of games over the last 20 years, it’s just that they were all apparently adventure games.
http://www.lasthalfofdarkness.com/

That’s a far cry from the Bloodlust game. I liked a lot of what he did but things kind of broke down and became repetitive with the endless dungeon scaling so I hope he refines that. I thought the RPG elements of the game were very solid and overall it gave me a good VtM - Bloodlines vibe. I’m really looking forward to the sequel. It was obvious that the first one was done by one guy on a budget. The second one looks a lot better asset wise.

OMGOMGOMG

mRtTAPu

OMG it’s out!

It’s early access, Brian. Get out of your bunk ;)

Whatever, I’m gonna buy it as soon as I have a new machine, as I don’t have 30gb to spare right now. :/