Vampire the Masquerade: Coteries of New York review – Welcome to Unlife

By Manish Rajesh | Updated on 05-Mar-2020

Manish Rajesh

05 Mar 2020 15:48

HIGHLIGHTS

VTM: Coteries of New York is a visual novel style game, based in the World of Darkness Universe.

For a visual novel, Coteries of New York is a short experience, lasting five to six hours at most.

Basic features one might expect from a visual novel game are missing. Such as the lack of a save feature.

Before we say anything about Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York, we have two things to mention. One, we’re shortening that to VTM – Coteries of New York cuz gawd dayum that’s a mouth-full to type (wait what?), and two, this game is a visual novel. The inspiration for this game – or any other VTM game for that matter – comes from White Wolf Publishing’s Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop RPG and is set in the fictional World of Darkness. Great, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s review!

Story

This is a visual novel, so understandably, it’s all about the story. VTM as a franchise is incredibly rich in lore, and it shows while you’re “playing” through the game. There’s no denying that the writing is good, and we found ourselves playing the game through to the end in a single sitting. Now if this were a traditional visual novel experience, finishing it in a single sitting would mean that we have absurd amounts of stamina when it comes to sitting on our behinds and reading for days on end. However, Coteries of New York was a very short experience, lasting merely 4-5 hours at most. While that’s definitely not the only thing that bothered us, we’ll get to all that after we’ve addressed the plot.

We’ll try and keep this as spoiler-free as possible. Basically, the game puts you in the shoes of a fledgling, or a newly turned vampire. From there, you’re given a crash course on the Masquerade, which is basically vampire law. It mostly entails making sure humans don’t find out about the existence of vampires. After that you go through Vampire 101, where you learn the basics of vampiring. You know, hunting, feeding, that sort of thing. The next part is building your “coterie”, which is a fancy word for gang. Each potential recruit for your coterie comes with their own backstory, complete with an interesting personal quest to complete. We’d even say it’s worth starting a new game to play through them all because of how good the writing is for some of them. While you’re doing all that running around, there’s a bigger conspiracy unfolding in the background, which you need to get to the bottom of. The game leaves you high and dry with the end of the story though, which is a huge bummer for a visual novel.

Coteries of New York is a great introduction to the World of Darkness and the world of VTM. If you’re looking forward to VTM – Bloodlines 2, or are a fan of the World of Darkness in general, you’ll probably enjoy this. It does a great job of familiarising you with the terms you’ll no doubt see a lot of in the upcoming World of Darkness games.

“Gameplay”

Yes, “gameplay”. Considering this is a visual novel and there’s only so much you can do in them when it comes to gameplay, VTM – Coteries of New York is a pretty bad visual novel. The very basic features one might expect from a visual novel are missing from Coteries of New York, including the feature to save! The only time you can save is when you exit the game, which is absurd. If you’re someone who’s finicky about choice-making in visual novels and saves before every choice-made, this will probably annoy you to no end. We get wanting there to be consequences to making a decision – since you can’t save you can’t really go back on a choice once made, but the game lacks even in that department. Your choices make little to no difference in the overall plot. This sucks (no pun intended), you could honestly just have made this a slide show, we might have enjoyed it just as much. Of course, then there’s also the fact that once you finish the game, it deletes your save file. Yep.

Yeah, other than that gameplay is just a whole lot of clicking.

Graphics and audio

The game features some really nice artwork, the characters and backgrounds have a very unique aesthetic that fits the overall theme and setting of the world very well. The eyes especially. Even the audio is fitting, with sounds happening at apt moments. Including some very loud sounds for dramatic effect.

There were quite a few bugs and glitches, including plenty of typos, but developer Draw Distance has already released two patches to that end. Hopefully, they’ll patch it.

Verdict

Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York is what we would call the appetizer to the upcoming Bloodlines 2. For old or new fans of the franchise, it’s a great refresher course that also treats you with an intriguing story and cast of characters. Unfortunately, it falls pretty hard on its face as what’s supposed to be a visual novel experience; inconsequential choices, and the lack of basic QoL features one expects from a VN.