Frequently Wrong, Rarely in Doubt

I have spent a disconcerting amount of time powerwalking through digital Seattle. In Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, you are a creature of the night – predator, immortal, heir to secret societies and ancient conspiracies. You are also, unfortunately, someone who cannot fast travel.

The game begins with all the promise of a gothic epic: whispered intrigue, glowing eyes, a hunger for blood and power. Within an hour, I had become less an apex predator and more a slightly irritated commuter with fangs. There is something absurd about being an all powerful undead who must walk briskly across the city to file reports and collect gossip. It’s like discovering that Dracula spent his evenings on a Fitbit challenge.

Each quest begins the same way: an urgent summons from one of Seattle’s vampire factions. You accept, full of anticipation. And then you check the map, revealing that your objective is not across a hallway or even across a district – it is, inevitably, across the entire city. There are no horses, no carriages, no bats to transform into. And most jarringly, no fast travel options – there will be no using your imagination for a more seamless gameplay experience. Just you, your two immortal legs, and a growing resentment toward urban sprawl. I have come to know the streets intimately. The narrow alleys, the hollow glow of shop windows, the eternal snow drifts that makes even the neon look tired. I have also worn out my thumb pressing down the left stick to move a little faster – an acceleration so modest that it feels less like running and more like deciding to be on time for once.

When I do, occasionally, indulge in vampiric behavior – feeding on some unsuspecting NPC – the game reminds me that this is, in fact, a moral and logistical inconvenience. Feed too publicly, and the world politely threatens to collapse. “You are about to break the Masquerade,” it warns, by flashing an unhappy mask icon at the top of the screen – as if I’d been caught shoplifting from a small-town CVS rather than engaging in the ancient ritual of blood consumption.

The solution is simple, if humiliating: retreat into an alley and wait for the panic to subside. In practice, this means crouching motionless behind a dumpster while the city’s AI resets its collective memory. These moments of stillness have become their own ritual. I often bring an actual book to read while my character hides – something light, like a James Joyce novel. This, I’ve realized, is the truest form of roleplay: not pretending to be a vampire, but performing the emotional labor of one. The hunger, the shame, the waiting, the endless walking.

Bloodlines 2 ends up on my “games not worth playing list” – not because anything is necessarily bad about it; but the whole game is chronically mis-sized. Much like its protagonist – one vampire’s mind trapped inside another’s body – it plays like a ten-hour experience awkwardly expanded to fit the shell of a thirty-hour epic. The pacing stretches thin, taut, almost translucent, as if the designers mistook distance for depth.

There’s an earnestness to it, though. You can sense the ambition, the insistence that “bigger” means “better.” But in practice, this just translates to longer walks between smaller events. The world is rich with potential, but that potential lives several blocks away, behind two loading screens, and around the corner from a blood donor who doesn’t want to be bothered.

The Verdict

I did not finish Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. At some point – somewhere between the fifth identical alley and the twentieth polite reminder that I was about to break the Masquerade  – I simply stopped moving. I realized that for all my walking, I hadn’t actually gone anywhere. It wasn’t a rage quit. It was more of a gentle surrender. I closed the game the way you might quietly leave a museum exhibit after realizing that all the paintings, though beautiful, are variations of the same landscape. You respect the artistry; you simply no longer have the stamina to care.

Maybe the game’s pacing is meant to evoke eternity – that endless, slow ache of existing forever with nothing urgent to do. If so, then it’s an unqualified success. Perhaps that will be the secret charm of Bloodlines 2 for some people: its accidental realism. Immortality, after all, is rarely exciting. What is eternity but an endless commute between one obligation and the next? Maybe the slow walking, the crouching, the need to hide after every meal – maybe all of it is part of the point. The game asks you to inhabit not the fantasy of being powerful, but the fatigue of being alive forever. And so you walk. Past the same alleys, the same NPCs, the same snow banks reflecting the same streetlights. You feed, you hide, you wait, you walk again. In that sense, it is – against all odds – a deeply honest simulation. A game that, in attempting to dramatize the ecstasy of vampirism, accidentally captures the quiet despair of adulthood.

But even as a vampire, I have my limits. There are only so many alleys one can crouch in, so many warnings one can receive, before eternity starts to feel like a technical issue. So I stopped. Not out of anger, but out of recognition. I may be undead, but even I know when something’s better left buried.