Vampire: The Masquerade – Reckoning of New York just feels like the adventures of the World of Darkness' most annoying kindred

Here's a thing about me: I loved Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York, the sequel to 2019's good-but-not-great visual novel Coteries of New York. Its blend of excellent art, a killer soundtrack, and writing that—so far as I'm concerned—captured the true, stifling horror of the World of Darkness struck me so hard that it inspired my first-ever published piece of games writing, effectively putting me where I am today.

So it's a game with a profound and special place in my heart, which meant when its follow-up, Reckoning of New York, dropped last week, I rushed to get my hands on it. Draw Distance gets the World of Darkness—particularly its modern variant—like few other devs can, and I was eager to see how it wrapped up its trilogy.

The answer, I'm sorry to say, is underwhelmingly. I've not hit Reckoning of New York's end yet, but I've seen enough to call it a step back from everything that still makes Shadows of New York one of my favourite games. Music, art, and—most fatally of all—writing: It's all just a bit worse than it was when the studio was firing on all cylinders back in 2020.

Where Coteries led you choose between three clans and Shadows put you in the shoes of Julia—member of the Lasombra, the vampiric clan of shadows, Reckoning has you play (on your first playthrough) a Ravnos named Kali. The Ravnos tend to be vagabonds and tricksters, a clan largely uninterested in the internecine politicking that defines vampiric sects like the Camarilla and Sabbat. Kali is no different, making her unliving as a smuggler on the outskirts of polite society. Her only haven is a tooled-up RV, and her only connections are her sire and their coterie of petty vampire crooks.

Kali is the first problem I had with Reckoning of New York. She's, well, insufferable. Tastes vary, of course—plenty of players didn't like the heavily millennial-coded protagonist of Shadows, who I related to on an almost mystical level—but it sometimes feels like every third thing out of Kali's