Rebel Wolves is clearly working in territory its founders know well, but Coen’s vampire story is not shaping up to be a simple imitation.
Rebel Wolves and Bandai Namco gave WCCFTech the chance to spend four hours with the studio’s debut game, The Blood of Dawnwalker. The team includes several former The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt developers, so comparisons are inevitable, but the demo suggests the game is aiming for more than that.
The story follows Coen, an ordinary man with one goal: freeing his family from the grasp of Brencis, an ancient vampire lord. The preview covered the opening section of the adventure, where players hunted animals for resources, completed everyday tasks, and gradually slipped into the much darker world of the local vampire clan.
The developers previously raised concerns with the game’s thirty-day time limit, but it does not pressure players with a constantly ticking clock. The system is closer to Persona 5: days and nights are divided into multi-hour blocks, and completing quests advances time.
During the first night of the opening chapter, Coen must participate in a blood ritual with the local vampire clan. Before that point, the player already has to decide whom to help in Coen’s village, because there is simply not enough time to do everything.
In the demo, players had to find a stolen flag meant to be displayed at a nighttime witches’ gathering, obtain medicine for Coen’s sick mother, and deal with several smaller quests that all appeared urgent.
The decisions quickly had consequences. Coen’s siblings had to be left on their northern fishing expedition because there were not enough hours in the day. Preparing medicine for his mother also showed the importance of paying attention, as the game displays the recipe steps only once.
The combat system carries traces of the The Witcher legacy, but Rebel Wolves adds several ideas of its own. Players can choose between two styles: the traditional system offers simpler controls but consumes more stamina when parrying, while directional combat grants more precision and different unlockable bonuses.
When attacking, players can choose from four directions, with vertical strikes mainly used for heavy overhead blows. Even before becoming a Dawnwalker, Coen possesses supernatural senses that allow him to detect attacks coming from off screen.
Enemy attacks in the demo were fairly predictable, so fighting several opponents at once was not impossible even on the highest difficulty. Combat animations and attack patterns sometimes repeated, so the final version will depend heavily on how much more advanced the enemy AI becomes.
The story takes place in Vale Sangora, a small region in the Carpathians ruled by Brencis and his three strongest vampire lieutenants. According to the developers, it may theoretically be possible to fight Brencis near the beginning of the game if every attack is perfectly parried, although Coen’s weakness at that point will probably make that a challenge only for the most committed players.
The demo did not reveal much about the Court system, but while clearing camps and completing side quests in southern Vale Sangora, an attention meter slowly increased. This suggests that one of the vampire lords gradually becomes more aware of the player’s actions.
By the end of the first night, Coen becomes a Dawnwalker and begins discovering the new abilities granted by his vampire blood. At that point, the game’s large but tightly connected open world truly opens up, with supernatural daytime leaps and nighttime wolf transformation making travel through the forested landscape much faster.
The Blood of Dawnwalker embraces its The Witcher roots, but its time-management structure, the duality of vampire existence, and a world that reacts to player choices give it a clear search for its own identity. The game launches on September 3 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.
Source: WCCFTech
