Nighthawks review

• Reviews by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

So good you'll want to drain every last drop of narrative role-playing goodness from its many branching veins

Endlessly reinterpreted across all kinds of media, the vampire fascinates us while remaining firmly locked away in the shadows. In this regard, Nighthawks immediately stands apart by dragging the secretive society of blood-drinking nightwalkers into full view. By removing the masquerade of a mundane world and confirming the existence of the supernatural, developer Richard Cobbett and publisher Wadjet Eye Games have created an utterly engrossing narrative role-playing experience filled with memorable moments and iconic individuals. Taking dozens of hours to complete, it’s a gripping character-driven tale that brought me under its spell and wouldn’t let go until I was done, then stuck with me long after watching the credits roll.

Your story begins as a recently sired vampire searching for the traitorous vassal of the one who brought you into the world of the undead six months prior. This hunt sends you to the city district of Cradlebridge, a melting pot where vampires are granted amnesty for any past crimes and the chance at a new life alongside humanity. But this meshing of humans and monsters isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and like any forced reintegration there’s plenty of ruffled feathers along the way. Churches are forced to remove religious imagery from their exteriors to avoid accidentally harming any unaware creatures of the night, and medical clinics must now deal with blood supply issues for both humans in need and those who must drink it to sustain themselves. Private security specializing in the specific threats posed by vampires are now commonplace, and a governing body consisting of members of high-ranking vampiric bloodlines serves as the global face of their kind on the world stage. This is a society trying to figure out what exactly to do with your race, and after ten years of vampires being public knowledge, most folks still don’t have a great answer to what should come next.

The heart and soul of Cradlebridge (if it had either) is its longstanding titular nightclub. A beacon of neon light and electronic dance against a backdrop of grime, Nighthawks is the social hub of the district where vampires and humans alike clink glasses of blood against more traditional cocktails. After being swept up in a series of events, you soon find yourself in charge of this establishment with a city full of problems eagerly awaiting your next move. Now it’s up to you to decide who to trust, which alliances to craft and bloodlines to break, and ultimately determine the future of vampires in this new world order. Whether you try to do what’s right or crush everyone under the weight of your undead wrath, it’s your empire to build.

Nighthawks is a narrative-heavy, character-driven role-playing game with a healthy dose of visual novel elements thrown in for good measure. You begin by creating your unseen character by selecting from four key attributes: your Sire who made you a vampire (be it an Aristocrat, Warrior, or another); your Origin, which defines where your vampiric lineage comes from (e.g. if you arose in the modern world of skyscrapers and lights or if you came from the Old Country of superstitious villages and dark forests); your unique Gift that allows you to use a special power (such as Mesmerism of the living or Natural Dominion to commune with animals); and your Knowledge specialty (for example, your potential history with Academia or deep understanding of the Occult). Choices made, you must then name your new walker of the night. I called mine “Domino Montes,” which I unfortunately found out hours later shares a first name with a companion character.

Half of the screen shows gorgeous hand-painted still backgrounds with full character depictions (anyone familiar with Ben Chandler’s work in Old Skies or Unavowed will immediately recognize his incredible work here) and lightly animated elements, with the other half taken up by an ornate text box where dialogue, choices, and quest updates are listed, along with your character status. Beneath that is your smartphone, which acts as a menu that can show e-mails you receive, your skills and traits, character profiles, current and completed quests, in-game daily news updates, and the save/load function. (There is also a separate Settings button with options for text visibility and volume sliders.)

Aside from your phone, lovingly held in place by the wisecracking tutorial gargoyle whose eyes light up to accompany a short line of text whenever you mouse over him (unnamed in-game but canonically called “Toots,” as revealed in our earlier interview with Cobbett), the bottom right of the screen shows a bank level denoting your financial status (with no numerical value, wealth is instead represented by descriptive tiers), your prestige in the community, the amount of blood you currently have available (fittingly shown as a vial of red liquid), and your health.

Your hunger to drink blood will slowly increase daily but goes down slightly whenever you partake of blood in a glass, and can drop significantly more when drinking blood directly from a host (willing or not), while your level of suspicion from humans rises whenever you perform illegal acts. Suspicion can be lowered through bribes or other choices, but be sure to keep a low profile if you don’t want to attract the attention of those who’d like nothing more than to make your second life distinctly shorter than you intend. Allow your hunger to rise too high, and you might find yourself in a situation where the monster comes out by force – with fatal consequences.

Outside of these omnipresent gauges, there are special indicators for when you have suffered a serious wound or if you have partaken of toxic blood, both of which will negatively impact certain skills until healed or dealt with. A last indicator will light up when time reaches 4 a.m., which is a warning of imminent sunrise that will prove deadly if you do not retreat to your sanctuary to rest up. Simulated in-game time moves forward a bit whenever you perform minor actions, and will jump ahead longer periods of time when carrying out more involved tasks like a shift at the vampire equivalent of a soup kitchen, or training at an underground fighting ring. Most nights have you “waking up” from your daytime torpor with more than eight hours to do with as you please, which is plenty to get through a sizable number of tasks so long as you aren’t mindlessly wandering with no real end goal.

While some quest decisions will be affected by the choices you make during character creation, the majority of outcomes will be largely dependent on stat rolls based off your current skillset level. You have five key skills: Brawler, Grifter, Detective, Mechanic, and Thief. These affect how you can handle different situations, and give you an idea of how likely a success or failure would be if you attempted to use one to resolve a scenario. Outside of key skills, you also have advanced ones: Domination, Intimidation, and Seduction, which typically provide additional outside-the-box options to get yourself out of a situation. Low on Thief skills but you want to get through a locked door? Maybe try Seduction and convince a guard to let you in instead. There’s never just one way through any particular quest. Even if you fail a skill check or you have a low skill rating in something you want to see through, there’s lots of options for either giving yourself a temporary boost or trying a different angle.

Accompanying the action is an incredible score by another Wadjet Eye regular, Thomas Regin, whose soundtrack blends jazz, electronic, and classical soundscapes across a variety of genres. A chilling dollhouse quest line is complemented by an unnerving piano piece that adds another layer to its quiet horror, while the sin-soaked streets of Angelbreach have a deep EDM bass that matches the nightlife sleaze of its flaunted strippers and musky casinos.

The majority of the game has you reading through scenario descriptions laid out, or having dialogue spoken aloud when characters are talking. Wadjet Eye’s Dave Gilbert is no stranger to collecting incredible voice talent, and Nighthawks is no exception. There isn’t a single poor performance here, with standouts like Amelia Tyler as the sociopathic Monika Vail, who I loved to hate, and Ivy Dupler as the mysterious magician Madame Lux, who quickly became one of my favorite companion characters with her larger-than-life showbusiness attitude. I’d have preferred a voiced narrator for the many lines of descriptive text (similar to Disco Elysium: The Final Cut), and for the little text bubbles that pop up from your current companion from time to time to be spoken aloud, but in a game with almost a million words, it’s an understandable budgetary restriction.

The various human and vampire characters you can invite along on your adventures are easily one of the strengths of Nighthawks. The first companion you meet depends on who you choose as your sire. I picked the Aristocrat, which meant the high-class Veronica Castigliano was sent to seek me out by her Patriarch to rekindle an old friendship with your sire. Other companions can be met either through random encounters, side quests, or main storylines. My personal favorite was Inez Salamandra, a cool vampire pirate turned biker gang member with a take-no-nonsense attitude and a propensity for telling those that rub her the wrong way to eat her entire *insert crude body part here*.

Whenever a companion joins you, they offer stat buffs and special bonuses to your party depending on their own skillsets. The tech knowledge of expert photographer and private eye Domino, for example, allows you to hack into certain devices without having such expertise yourself. Once you have asked a companion to join you, they will be shown at the bottom of the dialogue window so it’s easy to tell who’s with you when you’re out and about. You can only have one companion at a time, with any others you’ve unlocked so far typically hanging out at the Nighthawks bar or elsewhere in town at their place of work. Maze, for instance, will be running his phony cult in the basement of his bookshop to lure in desperate humans.

With the increased number of companions hanging out at the club comes more of my favorite aspect of the game: the dialogue interactions between them. Some characters will form fun rivalries with each other, like Inez and your bartender Becca Glade competing in ever more involved practical jokes on one another. The self-proclaimed “Queen of Rats,” a hundred-year-old-trapped-in-the-body-of-a-child named Agatha Condell, has some of the funniest lines, along with what is quite possibly the longest fart sound ever made by a character in response to being told they need an ID to get into a bar. Sometimes you’ll even see companions interacting outside of your club, like Madame Lux taking Inez on a shopping trip to buy clothing that’s a bit more modern, or the Irish vampiric street fighter Saoirse Kane training the religious Alexander Connolly in the art of punching stuff by running laps and doing endless push-ups.

Nighthawks

Genre:	Drama
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Slideshow
Theme:	Monsters, Psychological
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Illustrated realism
Gameplay:	RPG, Visual novel, Choices matter, Resource management
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Long (more than 10 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

Getting around in Nighthawks is easy. The district of Cradlebridge is depicted on a city map with different locations denoted by circled points of interest, including zoomed-in shots of the location interior. Mousing over a destination will show how long it will take to get there, and once you click on it you’ll head out automatically. At various points you will be interrupted by random events when traveling, but these are not typical RPG encounters where you must fight mindless monsters for experience points. Sometimes they will be threats like members of the masked anti-vampire hate group “The Human Edge,” which you will have to deal with, but even when faced with such situations, most encounters will have multiple options to choose from, like using your advanced skills, sneaking away or conning your foe into letting you go.

Of course, if none of those work you can also resort to hitting things. Once you choose the option to fight, automatic combat is depicted by punching sounds as your foe’s portrait flashes red whenever they’re taking damage. Your own green vigor gauge slowly decreases until either it’s completely depleted or your opponent runs out of whatever health total they’re allocated. If successful, the text log on the right will display what happens next, along with any additional choices you have, such as whether or not you want to kill someone after beating them.

Some longer fights (like those in the fight club) will have multiple phases with skill checks. After clearing a first phase the usual way, player options will appear, such as dodging out of the way that you can attempt to perform if your Thief skill is high enough. If you win this mid-fight check, you’ll regain some of your health before continuing to auto-bash your foe. If you run out of life force in battle, you will black out and be taken to the vampire clinic (run by the extremely unhinged Dr. Samuel Finch) for healing and lose any remaining time for that particular night. I only had this happen once in my entire forty-hour playthrough, so as long as you’re choosing options that match well with your skillset, you should be fine.

Nighthawks is split into five acts, each giving you a month of in-game time to complete its main objectives, as well as any side content available. The first act takes place exclusively in Cradlebridge, but from the second act onwards you will gain access to the two neighboring districts – the red light district of Angelbreach, and the high-class district of Fountaincourt. Moving between each is handled through taxi cabs that can be chosen from the map, or you can travel through the sewer system, without the threat of aboveground events but opening yourself up to the dangers that lurk in the dark underground catacombs. The sewers can be easy to get lost in at first, but one of your companions can get you wherever you need to go automatically if they are in your party. Alternatively, once you discover enough places to either re-emerge on the city streets above or travel between the different districts, you unlock a trait that allows you to travel directly to known locations regardless of which companion is with you.

While a month may seem restrictive with how many tasks there are open to you in Nighthawks, I never found myself running up against the deadline. In fact, I made sure to complete every side quest that came my way, because every single one of them is incredible. My personal favorites were all the companion-specific quests that helped flesh out their pasts and reasons for being in Cradlebridge, even leading to potential romance options for most of them. Many of the backstories took me by surprise with how closely their fates entwined with major events transpiring in the world. Agatha’s tale in particular is fantastic, with a shocking reveal that completely reframes another major character. That isn’t to say that the non-companion-focused quests aren’t great too, as the one I liked most of all is a hilarious riff on White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade that is nothing short of comedic genius. I won’t spoil it here, but make sure to sit in with the group of nerds playing with dice when given the chance.

The writing is excellent throughout, deftly balancing humor with deadly seriousness while wonderfully conveying distinctly different personalities for its diverse cast of characters. The revolutionary “Queen of Nightmares” Seraphine Lascelles and her terrifying hook-wielding strongman Raphael Durant may first appear to be the “bad guys” in vampire society, but the more I talked with Seraphine, the more I realized things weren’t so simple. Monika Vail may be a community leader by name, but her methods for keeping vampires out of the public eye are as ruthless as she is.

Each character faction has understandable goals and ambitions that can either go against or align with what you’ve come to believe in, and the choices you make can lead to very different outcomes both big and small. The main story of your rise to power as either community leader or tyrant of Nighthawks is equally brilliant, with ever-increasing stakes that reach a fever pitch by the finale with four entirely different possible endings. There is a moment during the last act that makes it clear whichever option you choose will lead to a specific ending, and what I like most is that there is no “right” answer to pick.

As good as it is, Nighthawks isn’t perfect, of course. One consistent problem I experienced throughout was the uncertainty of how to progress certain quests. The quest log will say something like “wait to be contacted by ____” but there’s no indication of how long that might be or even if it’s something that can be finished in the current act. (Unlike the handy indicator when choosing to end an act, which will tell you if any of your active quests will roll over or if they need to be finished before moving on, if at all). Thankfully, there’s so much to do in and around Cradlebridge that I rarely had to worry about finding new objectives to undertake while waiting for others, and typically it was just a matter of time before I received an e-mail or a character came to meet me at my sanctuary to start the next phase of the mission.

In a game as packed as this, perhaps it’s no surprise that I experienced a few minor inconsistencies with continuity too. One companion quest had me searching for the whereabouts of a particular character while the biker gang leader Finn Walker (who had asked me to search for her) was in my party. After finding the character, I still had to re-tell Finn in person at his bar that I had done what he asked, even though clearly he already knew. Situations like this rarely came up, but it was jarring to my suspension of disbelief when it did.

Nighthawks forces you to stick with the choices you made at the start, and I’m glad it did as I have played many other RPGs that allow you to become a jack of all trades, making your initial character build irrelevant. With that said, I wish there were more opportunities to use certain vampiric Gifts, as some seem much more useful than others, with grayed-out options indicating that I needed a different vampire power. I chose Corpsetalking in my playthrough, as the ability to witness the ghostly echoes of the recently deceased seemed like it would be an interesting and useful skill in this world – and for the situations where it was available for use, it was! Unfortunately, I think I only used it five times in total, compared to numerous situations where Mesmerism was offered as a quest option, or Natural Dominion to talk with rats. Then again, those are powers some companions possess so you can use them whenever they’re your chosen party member.

Minor criticisms aside, this is a compelling package that brings together so many great ideas into one cohesive world. I loved seeing the clever ways in which the exposure of vampires shaped this society, from pepper spray being imbued with silver (toxic to the vampires of Nighthawks), to characters like Veronica lamenting how she has to re-pierce her ears each night due to how quickly vampires heal from bodily wounds. And while you are constantly reminded that you are literally a monster, it does not mean you have to do monstrous things.

There is a trait at the start of the game called “Consensualist,” which you keep as long as you never choose to drink the blood of a human without permission. Many times you have the option of bleeding enemies dry or stalking the night to prey upon victims to satiate your hunger, but I chose not to do so. It made keeping my hunger in check much harder, but I spent the extra time to ensure I always tried to live as a “moral” vampire. I strove to do right not because I had to, but because I was enthralled by the stories of these characters and wanted to see them find joy in a hostile world. And yet it’s a testament to how brilliantly layered this game is that you could make your character much more ruthless and violent, with very different consequences. 

Final Verdict

Overall, this game is a wonderful narrative role-playing experience that is an easy recommendation to any vampire enthusiast. Whatever minor complaints I have pale in comparison to the plethora of things it excels at. The cast of companions is richly varied and wonderfully written, the music and art are both top-tier, and even the optional quests are all so enthralling that I squeezed every last drop out of the available stories before heading to the finale. And that’s not even factoring in replay value. While each act structure is largely linear, there are so many different character options and ways to handle the diverse obstacles thrown at you that no two playthroughs need play out exactly the same. The main campaign is well worth seeing through to the end(s), but when all is said and done, the moments I remember most are the small things along the way: seeing a vampire companion smile for the first time in hundreds of years, or seeing the excitement of some orphaned teenage vampire outcasts when I bought them a TV and game console. Nighthawks may be a story about vampires living in modern society, but it’s impossible to deny its soul in the telling.

Sam played Nighthawks on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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