my baby needs blood

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 10m, two playthroughs

Given that there is an annual Queer Vampire Jam in the IF community, it should come as no surprise that a disproportionate amount my IF review corpus features bloodsuckers. It is to the community’s credit that so little of it feels repetitive or derivative. mbnb is no exception there. It presents a satisfyingly unique setting: introducing the possibility of vampires in a hunting/gathering native society scrabbling for survival. I say possibilities because here the concerns of the piece are quite distant from any elements of vampirism. So much so, if not for the proclaimed context of the piece, it could easily be read as vampire-free. (Ok, maybe not EASILY, but certainly POSSIBLY.)

This is a visual novel, the player/reader’s input confined (it seems?) to page turning. The most immediate and satisfying part of the work is its visual presentation. A moody soundtrack of wind matched to 16-bit animations of buffeting branches in blues, blacks and greys. It very effectively conveys a harsh, barren environment where humanity can barely eke out a life. This is complemented by the font: a dark, frazzled rendering that seems as battered by the elements as the story’s setting.

Into this hard-scrabble wasteland, we are introduced to a wife caring for an ailing maybe-vampire husband. (I say ‘maybe’ because while she does indeed provide the titular fluid, it is animal blood which, if not for outside-game context, could be susceptible to a non-vampire ‘indigenous medicine’ interpretation.) The CONCERNS of the piece have little to do with any of that. The wife-protagonist feels an imposter in her home, including but not limited to ambivalence in starting a family and subversive folklore engagement. None of it having anything to do with the putative needs of her husband.

The graphical vibe was nicely evocative, but thanks to the vampire headfake, the story ended up feeling unfocused. The protag’s self-alienation was quite independent of her setting, her husband’s outre' nature and really anything beyond the pervasive mood. I haven’t yet addressed the most challenging aspect to the work, which is its user interface. Not only does the work make extensive use of the dreaded timed text, it ups the ante by ALSO using timed transitions. Very, very slow timed transitions. On top of that, there is a confounding UI element. On some screens, a targeting cursor follows your mouse, suggesting a pixel-hunting paradigm. Except, not only is the cursor more reminiscent of modern scope-mounted weapons, it is unclear if anything actually needs targeting. I think I concluded it was meant to represent bird hunting, but it is all so obliquely implemented it ends up being effectively little more than MORE delay. The feedback on this mechanism is completely missing, meaning I could easily be just reading this into the work where it is not intended. So yeah, a bit too slow and unfocused to really land.

Even so, still worth it for the impressive graphical flourishes. Wouldn’t come in with my heart set on vampires tho.