Vampire: the Masquerade has been my favorite tabletop roleplaying game for the longest time. V5—the latest/current edition that this interactive novel is directly based on—is my least favorite edition ever, both in terms of system changes and especially because of the metaplot. A big part of it is that by the time the creators of the game shared their vision of how the shadowy vampire world works in the twenty-first century, a lot of us have been telling our own stories of this "future in the present" at our tables. For me, the current metaplot hasn't been able to top the stories I've been a part of, and sticking to it would make continuing those stories impossible. So I've been decisively ignoring most of the V5 products. But I do still love the setting at large, and I also love Choice Of games, so when I found myself craving a dose of conspiracy with fangs, I decided to give it a shot. Happy to report I don't regret it.

Even though this is definitely a V5 story with V5-specific plot points, it gave me plenty of what I love about VtM in general. There were a lot of nods toward VtM: Bloodlines here (one of the best action rpg videogames of all times despite all the bugs, fight me), both explicit and associative. There was a great plot twist early on that turned into a deeply compelling side plot. All the characters I've met were fully fleshed out and interesting, no task my Caitiff-masquerading-as-Ventrue was sent on turned out to be exactly what it seemed, and the selection of choices helped me play out exactly the character arc I wanted and gave me plenty of ideas for future rereads/replays. Closer to the end, though, yet another plot twist that I'm pretty sure is a scripted event that would have occurred regardless of my choices kind of disappointed me. Perhaps it would have felt different if my character had a closer relationship to Julian instead of drifting away from him by the middle. Perhaps not.

I'm also wondering if yet another thing that happened in the final chapter could have been avoided at all. If it was a result of my own sequence of choices that led me to come into the final confrontation with dry veins, it makes for a suitably dramatic outcome. In any other setting, having everything I've worked for and betted on snatched right out of my hands by one oversight would have felt immensely disappointing. In VtM, it's just part for the course. But if that's a scripted part of the pro-Camarilla ending, then there's no real pro-Camarilla ending. Will investigate on a future play-through.

Otherwise, the pacing was tense, the writing was wonderful, the personal horror was there all the damn time, and I read/played through this entire huge interactive novel in one night because I just couldn't stop. The one problem now is I want more, but Choice Of has already promised more so I just need to wait.