The World of Darkness TTRPG—the wider setting for Vampire: The Masquerade—has a concept of a ‘true name’: A magical, essential identity that captures the base nature of its bearer.
What I posit to you is that the true name of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is not Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. It’s, I don’t know, Vampire: The Masquerade – Sleepless in Seattle or something. All I know is that it’s definitely not Bloodlines, and slapping that name on The Chinese Room’s game was a mistake.
More than a mistake, it was a disservice to the game itself. Here’s the thing: I very much enjoyed Bloodlines 2. It’s a great Vampire: The Masquerade game, dripping with atmosphere, vibrating with conspiracies, and hell, the combat can even be pretty fun when you’re absolutely clowning on a gaggle of ghouls with your elder vampire abilities.
But I say ‘it’s a great V:TM game’ deliberately. It’s a great Vampire game, but not a great Bloodlines game, and that latter name only ever detracts from the game we ended up getting 21 years after an RPG that people are still replaying today. Every attempt—sparse as those attempts were—to retrofit The Chinese Room’s approach to game development into a vaguely ‘Bloodlines-y’ shell just makes the game worse.
The sidequests? Formulaic and forgettable. The callbacks? Either entirely pointless or—as in the case of the single character cameo I won’t spoil—actively grating (and still pointless). Where Bloodlines 1’s hubs were relatively dense, Bloodlines 2’s eventually becomes a chore to traverse, and only seems to be open to provide a home for a load of collectibles you should under no circumstances collect.
The whole thing feels like a fundamental mismatch, and I’m less aggrieved about the perversion of the Bloodlines name—we still have that original game, after all—than I am about the fact it subjects The Chinese Room’s game to a burden of expectation it cannot meet. Maybe it never even had any intention to.
I say that because the parts of the game that are The Chinese Room’s forte, narrative and atmosphere, are genuinely very good, but it’s tough to bask in those things when you’re preoccupied by the fact that a game called Bloodlines 2 has almost none of the qualities of Bloodlines 1. Even when I played, I only truly started to enjoy the game when I began to pretend it was simply another game under the V:TM rubric—something like Shadows of New York or Night Call. Remove the weight of expectation and, hey, it turns out the game’s pretty good for what it is.
It makes me desperate to know the story of how this came about as the vision for a Bloodlines sequel. Right now, it feels like The Chinese Room had a good idea for a Vampire: The Masquerade game and Paradox—at a loss for what to do after the debacle of Hardsuit Labs’ original version of the game—got the studio to slap the name on it.
Meanwhile, players who approach the game because of the series on the label walk away disappointed and baffled from an experience that’s 75% linear(ish) narrative. Lord knows that’s not the players’ fault. Coming to a game called “Bloodlines 2” expecting a game like Bloodlines 1 is not an absurd assumption on anyone’s part, but it does mean Bloodlines 2’s light is hidden under a bushel for no good reason.
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