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Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road

by Kyle Marquis

Horror
2020

Web Site

(based on 12 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

The elders have entrusted you, an elite vampire courier, to deliver their secrets. Can you outrun the hunters, the other drivers, and the rising sun?

"Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road" is a 650,000-word interactive horror novel by Kyle Marquis, based on "Vampire: The Masquerade" and set in the World of Darkness shared story universe. Your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

It’s a new Dark Age for the dead. When the Second Inquisition's vampire hunters hacked phone lines and computer networks to expose and destroy vampires all over the world, the elders turned to undead couriers like you. For ten years, you’ve raced across the desert between cities, delivering vital information and supplies. But when an old friend reappears with a plan to disrupt the blood trade across the American Southwest, everything you’ve built starts crashing down.

Outrun the Competition. Drive, hide, or fight back! Unleash the powers of your blood in ancient Disciplines to change form, vanish from sight, or dominate the minds of your enemies. Employ blood magic, inhuman strength, and the creatures of the night to escape destruction—or just run your enemies off the road and keep driving.

Deliver or Die. All secrets have an expiration date—and so do you. Race across the desert to deliver secrets, promises, and threats. Do whatever it takes to drop off your parcel. But when the job is done, will you stick around to exploit the situation?

Run Down Your Prey. Only blood can sate the Hunger. Charm, seduce, or seize what you need, but don’t let anyone know what you are. If you break the Masquerade, your fellow vampires will destroy you for your indiscretions, assuming the Second Inquisition doesn't find you first.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
• Hunt the alleys and back roads of the American Southwest to stave off hunger and resist the frenzied call of the Beast.
• Join the Camarilla—the immortal society of the vampire elite—or break its hold on the border states.
• Confront the horrors of your immortal existence in illegal hospitals, disease-ridden prison camps, and forgotten research facilities littered with failed experiments.
• Modify your car for speed, durability, or smuggling, but remember—wherever you're going, you have to get there by dawn!
• Unlock the ability to play as Tremere or Caitiff with the Usurpers and Outcasts DLC.

Death is a hard road. You drive it every night.


Game Details


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Winner, Best Game - 2020 XYZZY Awards

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Number of Reviews: 2
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
An enormous stat-driven Vampire game with great art, September 27, 2020
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 2-10 hours

This game helps fulfill a childhood dream of mine. When I was younger, I always had access to and eventually bought a lot of guidebooks for RPGs. I focused on Dungeons and Dragons (I had over 20 AD&D 2E books as kid) but enjoyed White Wolf a lot. Sadly, although I really wanted it, I never found a group to run a campaign with and never tried playing Vampire: the Masquerade.

This game is exactly what I hoped for if I had played such a campaign. A clever story cooked up by a master DM (or the VtM equivalent), a large number of encounters with chances to grow my powers, and fun dives into lore and characters.

This game is designed to keep you on your toes. In an interview, the author said that his favorite concept in VtM is that just surviving is incredibly hard, and just dumping characters in a big city and seeing if they can live for a week. This is exactly the kind of scenario you have in the game.

You play as a vampire who is coming into Tucson after a long absence. The Prince there brings you into His service and asks you to complete several tasks. These tasks are each there own chapter, and there are 2 sets of 3.

You have many stats (over 30), with your initial stats determined by your clan (together with a clan weakness; mine was zoning out due to beauty). All stats are useful throughout the game, though mental stats are more useful early on.

Between mission you can spend your money (on housing, which is very useful, or cars, which the writer seems really really excited by and describes in incredible detail, with over a dozen options including exotic sports cars), upgrade your stats, or buy new equipment. You can turn NPCs into 'ghouls' who help you with everything. I got a ghoul early on and she factored into literally every mission from then on in an integral way.

True to the source, the game is heavily focused on stats and strategizing. The most important stat is hunger; high hunger makes you bad at everything, including finding more food to eat, so getting high hunger can cause a terrible spiral until you get back home and buy some cheap food. Moreover, using your coolest powers (i.e. 'disciplines') raises your hunger. You can use this to your advantage by using powers to hunt food, immediately wiping away your hunger boost.

I would describe this as a 'deluxe' Choice of Games title, if that descriptor existed. It has incredible graphics when you meet people, it has a great IP connection, and it is LONG.

I play a lot of IF games, and I can finish even very long material in an hour or two. But it took me an entire Saturday and much of the evening before to play this. It's like several shorter Choicescript games bundled together. To get a better idea of its length, I was thinking 'this game is huge' as I was getting close to its end. I was a little disappointed I had been able to raise my stats as high as I wanted, but it was okay. Then I realized that I was only halfway through the game.

There is some strong profanity in the game. I didn't run into any explicit sexual content. I received a review copy of this game. The violence level is about what you might expect from a game about superpowered vampires engaged in a war.

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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Bold storytelling, August 6, 2021
by NMCannon (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
Related reviews: World of Darkness, Choice of Games

With stellar writing, bold storytelling, and nail-biting stakes, this is, hands down, one of the best Vampire: the Masquerade games. If you love Bloodlines, you'll love Night Road.

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Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Great "white hat" horror games by genre by MathBrush
This list does not include games intended to disgust or to make you personally feel evil. The focus is on games where good overcomes evil, or that just make you think. That is what I mean by "white hat" games. Games like Vespers or...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road:

Games with a good "Investigation" feel by C4rd1n4l
I'm looking for games that really push you to closely examine every nook and cranny of a setting. Maybe an escape-room game of some kind where the player has to "solve" all the puzzles in a room before progressing.

Best Choicescript games by MathBrush
I've only played a few choicescript games, but I loved Creatures Such as We, The Race, and Scarlet Sails. What can you recommend?




This is version 2 of this page, edited by mifga on 26 October 2020 at 4:18pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page