This is the least-reviewed, least-rated XYZZY Best Game winner on IFDB. It’s a commercial game. It’s set in the Vampire: The Masquerade world. And the the steam reviews of it are wildly contradictory:
…Vampire: the Masquerade - Night Road is the best piece of Vampire: the Masquerade licensed fiction ever written, and no, I am not ******* joking.–TwoDee
This game is a disgrace to the Vampire IP.–Drew
The writing is GOOD. And I don’t mean “you can read it”, it’s GOOD-GOOD. It makes you feel like you ARE in the American south-west, even if you’ve never been there. It makes you feel like you ARE a courier driver caught in a political conflict. You are actually in danger. You can actually be in love. It’s fascinatingly well written. --Erylaria
Gameplay seems good enough (props for keeping the full tabletop ruleset), but the writing is a bit primitive for my taste and the plot fails to grip.–Subspace Dandy
Definitely one of the best role playing experiences I have had in years. If you are naive enough to have even a shred of hope for Bloodlines 2, you are better off playing Night Road. --Mel
First off before we get into anything let me just say, if your a fan of VtM DO NOT buy this you will regret it like i do, if your interested in VtM DO NOT buy this as it woefully misrepresents it – Storyteller Nylan
This is the best game in Choice of Games’ entire catalog. Period[…]I don’t regret a single cent I spent on buying this game, and I doubt you will either.–Petrichord
It’s too rushed, pacewise, to be a decent novel and too linear to be a decent game.-Charon
As mentioned in the last essay, this is the second-highest grossing Choicescript game of all time, or was by 2023.
As more myself, as I replayed this, I was surprised at how often I failed checks I should have succeeded in, at the bugs that still remain, at how easy it was to max out skills quickly (although this was addressed in-game). And yet, I think I’ll add this game to my Top 10 list on IFDB (bumping Adventure back down to 11th), the only XYZZY winner on that list and my favorite of all even after writing these essays.
What does it do right?
Mechanics
This game more or less faithfully recreates the system used by Vampire: The Masquerade, where there are three kinds of ways of interacting with the world:
-Roleplaying (here used with statless choices or relationship checks with NPCs)
-Attribute + Skill Check (where a relevant attribute, one of your innate ablilities, is added to a relevant skill, a learned ability. Behind the scenes, that many 10 sided dice are rolled, with a 6 or higher being a success on each die, and the number of successes needed determined by the author)
-Powers (automatic success when available, but increases or has chance to increase hunger)
Powers are what I love most about the system, and they’re different for each Clan. There are a lot of different clans (I’ve played a different one every time, this time being a Brujah.
As some reviews have noticed, this system takes some getting used to and can be imbalanced. For instance, having max values in both attributes, you can still lose the dice rolls. This usually gives you wounds or hunger.
I had max wounds and max hunger and didn’t die, but it is possible to die in such a state if you fail enough.
Removing hunger requires feeding on humans, which is always a roleplaying (do you feel guilty?) and stat-checking situation.
There are expansion packs for the other clans, but I haven’t bought them, although reading the ‘big’ pack it sounds really cool, so I might by it (I was gifted the original game, and I worked for the company at one point. This essay is in no way unbiased, except that I’m not being rewarded for it).
It sounds like I’m just describing the Vampire: The Masquerade mechanics instead of the game, but that’s just it. I’ve played other VtM games and didn’t get the experience I wanted, instead getting more of a novel with a couple of VtM-themed choices. This game implements those mechanics exactly the way I wish a DM would. I run DnD games for my son and friends, and playing this game feels just like running a real TTRPG does to me.
Options and depth
This game really sprawls. It’s 660,000 words, but unlike a lot of other big Choicescript games it doesn’t pack those into text dumps or long non-interactive sequences. There’s just a lot of choices, like 30 or more abilities. Most people giving steam reviews have around 20 hours, while some report having finished in 8.5 or so.
It has a branch and bottleneck structure. You create your character and backstory, meet important NPCs, then get 3 quests to complete in any order. You then get more exposition and three more quests, then a finale.
After each quest, you have a chance to improve things. You can spend money to get cars, from the dumpiest rustbucket you’ve ever seen for $300 or less or a powerful $50,000 luxury car. You can go from living in a parking garage to a vampire castle. Or you can spend your money on weapons, disguises, blood, etc. You gain experience points, allowing you to raise your vampiric abilities and powers.
The game really lets you take very different pathways in terms of powers you use and their strengths. Some are better than others; I used Celerity and Potence and maxed out physical things and I suffered the whole game due to lack of Charisma, only to completely sail through the ending by punching everything really hard while on 0 hunger. But that’s not the only difference; I ended the game this playthrough negotiating piece between two vampires while on another I worked with essentially the FBI. This game included plotlines I had no idea about in the first couple of playthroughs, including a lot on Julian Sim and tech that felt really new to me.
There are bugs. I swear a couple of times I upgraded an ability and my XP didn’t go down (although it may have just rejected my choice, now that I think about it, due to my lack of appropriate housing). So there may not be that many bugs anymore, but this is a big game and very complex, so I would be careful.
Plot and characters
Kyle Marquis usually writes really powerful worlds with fusions of technology, magic, and the ancients (like an archmage becoming a God or finding dinosaurs with a Byzantium-punk time machine). Those games are a lot of fun (I’ve replayed one recently) but often feel really removed from human experience.
The VtM world, though, is all about the human experience. The idea of the game is, what does it mean to be human when your life revolves around the suffering of others? Like most Star Trek or Lord of the Rings, the fantasy elements of the setting are just a way to showcase aspects of real human life.
I like the characters, although I was rebuffed by the goth pawn shop owner this time (due to my lack of Charisma). Especially interesting is the powerful ruler of the area who could crush you like a bug but has a secret interest in you, and the powerful medical vampire and her witch enemy-turned-friend (or more?).
The plot is big. Some of the other VtM games are street-level; a single vampire moves into town, and you, a human, have to protect yourself.
This game has massive repercussions. You can affect the fate of all vampires in the world. You can tangle with an elder capable of leveling civilizations. You can witness the prince of Tucson turn from a powerful warlord to a more and more vulnerable man who still doesn’t care about any of it because of his Call and his lost love.
Romance is not as deep as some games, like Creme de la Creme or Creatures Such as We, unless you pick one of the main characters. The characters do have cool art, though. When the scale is epic, sometimes the smaller characters get scoped out.
Conclusion
In a lot of ways, this is both one of the most flawed and one of the best XYZZY winners. The least popular on IFDB, but very popular on other platforms. More buggy or just weird mechanics than other winners, but offering a lot more flexibility. It’s a game of contradictions, and I love it.