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Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong highlights the banality of evil
T
Thomas Wilde
In Swansong, a narrative-driven detective game, you play as three vampires pulled into a sudden power vacuum in Boston’s undead underground. An unknown force attacked a big party on the other side of town, and now most of the local vampire aristocracy is missing or dead. With no other options, the vampire ruler of Boston calls on the three of you to deal with the problem.
That puts your characters in the ill-fitting roles of detective, diplomat, troubleshooter, and occasionally assassin, as you work to figure out who hit the party and why. It also requires you to go behind the scenes of the various vampire societies that secretly rule Boston, which is where Swansong’s brand of quiet, bureaucratic horror starts to sink in.
Horror in the margins
Ever since the tabletop game debuted in 1991, Vampire: The Masquerade has explored what it feels like to play as the actual monster. Every character is a vampire, typically a newly turned one, and a core theme of the series is managing the tug-of-war between your character’s fading humanity and your new vampire instincts.
Being a vampire is a messy, violent process that often comes with an attached body count—but if you completely give in to your predatory side, you’ll end up as a mindless killer. You want to be the vampires from Near Dark, but you need to be the vampires from Only Lovers Left Alive.
Swansong’s designers put real work and thought into how a secret vampire civilization would actually function. As you explore, your characters encounter all levels of vampire society, from rich bloodsuckers in penthouse lairs to blood junkies down by the docks. You end up with a lot of insight into how this vampire-controlled city functions night-to-night, and the ensuing high cost to humans.
The horror of Swansong’s take on vampire life is subtle enough to sneak up on you, quietly hidden in the game’s margins. Over the course of the game, you'll slowly start to realize just how dehumanized these vampires have actually become. All three of Swansong's playable protagonists have been undead for decades or centuries. There isn’t much about life as a vampire that surprises them anymore, good or bad, and that includes their attitude towards life and death.
Where classically a vampire would go out at night to hunt for lone travelers, in Swansong’s Boston there's the "blood trade. The vampires created widespread trafficking networks so they could stock up on people to bite the same way that you might grab a couple of extra bottles of wine. Essentially, everyone in Boston is now cattle without knowing it.
Swansong introduces the mechanic for feeding on humans during the tutorial. You walk into a private bar that caters to vampires and your character is given a choice between a glass of blood or a person. If you kill one of these “vessels” by drinking too much of their blood, the vampires around you treat it like a party foul.
A couple of hours later, you’ll investigate a nightclub that also serves as a sort of vampire restaurant, which offers menus that list each person's temperament and occupation like they’re rare and exotic flavors. Looking to relax? Why not eat a yoga teacher?
If you walk through the employees-only doors in that same nightclub, you’ll find a neatly sorted pile of bagged bodies next to a tunnel that links the nightclub’s basement to an underground river. People die at this nightclub so frequently that they’ve got illicit corpse disposal down to a science.
In a third chapter, you’re sent to negotiate with a band of free-agent vampire Anarchs who are holed up in abandoned warehouses on Boston’s waterfront. If you explore the area, you can find a way into a nearby garage. It's mostly empty, but you'll find several people in there, so drugged that they can’t even really move. It took me a minute to realize why they were there. I’d stumbled into the Anarchs’ pantry.
Some of these are easy to overlook or in optional parts of the map, and all of them are presented without real comment. Another game might’ve made absolutely sure you noticed these details by attaching a jump scare to them, or having a character explain the details to you at length. If you were playing as a newly made vampire, like in 2004’s Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, you might've been human enough that some of these still registered as terrifying.
In Swansong, though, none of it comes as a surprise to anyone involved. These vampires, including the protagonists, are calm, structured, and efficient—to the point where even mass murder is mostly just a logistics problem. How do you come up with a couple of dozen people who won’t be missed, and where do you put the bodies afterward?
It’s a slower-boiling sort of horror than most vampire genre stories, both in- and outside of video games. It works because it isn’t treated like it’s a big deal.
Villain by default
You also aren’t given any choices that would really affect the status quo. Your characters are explicitly here to defend these systems that vampires have built. You have a lot of choices as to how you do that, but none of them involve going renegade.
Swansong does give you a lot of leeway in how its story plays out, up to and including the chance that you might get one or more of its three protagonists killed. There are even a couple of hidden plot branches that you can find if you explore, including one significant subplot that’s sealed behind a particularly difficult puzzle. I was surprised by just how flexible the game’s narrative turned out to be, particularly in a chapter where you infiltrate a busy crime scene.
The choices you make, however, are less about morality than about personal performance and/or collateral damage. The ideal win condition for your characters is to do what they’re told, leave no trace, silence all witnesses, and get out alive at the end. You’re here to make sure the vampires are able to continue their reign over Boston, complete with the attendant body count. You’re not even your own monster here—you’re the real monsters’ night janitor.
In a weird way, it’s refreshing. Swansong is a nice counterpoint to any number of games I’ve played where they’ll tell you that you can play the bad guy if you want, but their idea of “evil” is being a petty criminal, vindictive jerk, or a complete cartoon.
In Swansong, just existing in its world at all is enough to make you feel like the villain of the piece. The driving force behind Vampire as a series is that sort of personal horror, and here in Swansong, it’s abstracted out into a sort of murderous ennui.
The character in Swansong that best embodies this is one of the protagonists, Galeb Bazory, a Turkish vampire who’s closing in on his 300th birthday. Galeb has no illusions left about how vampires work, and is laboring under an ongoing sensation that everything he does is something he's done before, and something he’ll have to keep doing over and over again.
Whether it’s snapping an unarmed witness’s neck, brainwashing an inconvenient cop with a glance, or defending himself against vampire hunters, Galeb’s been here before. The other protagonists—nightclub owner Marie-Marguerite “Emem” Louis and mad prophet Leysha—have their own subplots, but Galeb’s sheer sense of fatigue is the standout. He’s been privy to this nightmare for so long that it’s become unsurprising or even dull, and that makes elements of that nightmare worse by comparison.
Swansong’s got more to offer a player than just its existential horror, of course. It features clever puzzles, a few tense sequences, multiple endings, and a branching narrative where even small choices can end up having long-term consequences. It’s also not afraid to let you succeed dramatically or fail outright, so your actions can either save or absolutely destroy Boston’s vampires.
What truly makes it a memorable horror experience, however, is its sense of banality. It’s a lot of work to be a blood-sucking monster, and in Swansong, you’re the unlucky bottom-rung vampire who has to go clean up everyone else’s mess.