Vampyr is a newly-revealed action-horror role-playing game from Dontnod Entertainment, the studio behind Remember Me and the upcoming episodic adventure, Life is Strange. Publisher Focus Home Interactive’s U.K. PR agency, Dead Good Media, revealed the game with a tweeted image:
Revealed today – Vampyr from dev studio Don't Nod #FocusNext pic.twitter.com/myx30yzRAB
— Dead Good Media (@DeadGoodMedia) January 20, 2015
TheSixthAxis filled in some context with a few, juicy details. The game is set in the immediate wake of World War I. You play as a doctor who has returned home during an outbreak of Spanish Influenza. One of his patients bites him, turning him into a vampire.
The “y” in the game’s title allegedly refers to the difficult, branching choices that the player will have to make, torn between the doctor protagonist’s Hippocratic Oath to save lives and his vampiric hunger to take them. The game’s tag line is, “Take blood. Save a life.”
Dontnod’s debut, Remember Me, received mixed reviews for taking an interesting mechanic of hacking memories and burdening it with an otherwise uninspired action RPG. The upcoming Life is Strange seems to have embraced that criticism by focusing primarily on narrative. rather than action.
Vampyr apparently returns to the action RPG genre, but it will be interesting to see if and how the studio’s experience with Life is Strange impacts its design. Dontnod has created a new team to develop Vampyr simultaneous to its other projects, which is a first for the studio.
Vampyr is in the early phases of development, and thus has no release window or platform information.
