The perfect game in almost every way.
As soon as I saw Rebel Wolves’ first teaser for The Blood of Dawnwalker, I was immediately hooked. It’s been a long couple of years since then, and we’ve seen so many great games come and go in that time.
But what Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the former game director for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and his team at Rebel Wolves came up with is nothing short of amazing, and I have a feeling that this could very well be 2026’s game of the year.
Whether it’s the combat, the story, the characters, or the setting, every part of The Blood of Dawnwalker screams high quality, and I genuinely believe nothing this year comes even close to it.
In The Blood of Dawnwalker, you play as Coen, a Slav peasant living in a fictional valley somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. He is of humble origin, living with his father, his siblings, and his feeble-minded mother, whom the family is desperately trying to cure. The game’s story starts right after that clip in the trailer, where Coen and his sister are rescued by a mysterious bunch of vampires led by the now-crowned Knyaz Brencis.
Once a month, the people of Sangora have to pledge a pint of their blood to the vampires, and in exchange they are allowed to drink the vampires’ own blood, which cures all illnesses, most importantly the currently ravaging Black Death. This yoke comes at a cost, as Brencis has a tendency to cull the weak, meaning Coen’s own mother could soon become food for this host of darkness.
One thing thus follows another, and the peasants of Laslea, Coen’s village, rebel. They try to dig up silver to use against the vampires, but their plot is unravelled after someone tips off the vampires, or vrakhiri, as the game calls them. Coen is then transformed into a vampire by Brencis to punish his father’s insolence and Coen’s participation, but something goes wrong, and Coen instead becomes a Dawnwalker — a vampire who can survive during the day.
This then forms both the narrative and the gameplay core of The Blood of Dawnwalker. During the day, Coen is purely human, using swords and other weapons to fight, whereas during the night he transforms back into a vrakhir, gaining all sorts of powerful abilities like walking on walls, using his deadly quick claws to fight, and, of course, becoming reliant on drinking blood to sustain himself.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/reviews/the-blood-of-dawnwalker-review/
