Because Blood of the Dawnwalker is focused on Eastern European monster folklore and because its developer, Rebel Wolves, is made up of a bunch of ex–CD Projekt Red devs, the game inevitably draws comparisons to The Witcher. But there’s another game’s influence that is all over the vampire RPG: Dragon Age: Inquisition. Not because of any story elements or romance options, but because, at any given time, you can get your shit rocked by a bear. Or a boar. Or a wolf. Or a demon dog.
It’s a lesson I learned quite early in my playthrough. After killing a house full of bandits, I found a treasure map leading me to a cave guarded by a bear. Enemies in Dawnwalker have helpful color-coded difficulty markers that let you know if one might be beyond your abilities, and since there was no little red or orange skull next to the bear’s health bar, and because I had dispatched the bandits with ease, I thought I’d have an easy time with a single bear. But Dawnwalker is DAI’s Hinterlands reborn, only here, instead of just one area, it’s the whole damn game. That bear mauled the shit out of me several times before I gave up, returning much later and much stronger.
It’s not the combat that makes animal encounters so scary, it’s the fact that animals will jump you from out of nowhere often when you’re already outnumbered. I could be fighting a group of soldiers and if the melee strays too close to a pack’s incredibly wide aggro zone, welp, now I have 30-50 feral hogs to contend with, too, as this post on Reddit so helpfully illustrates.
But the overwhelming combat odds are actually quite fun. Dawnwalker has a unique and very cool combat system that relies on directional attacks and blocking. There’s a UI feature that tells you where an attack is coming from to let you know which direction to block. While you can just hold the button without a direction for a basic block, if you take the time to add a direction to it, you’ll briefly weaken your opponent while filling up your ability meter faster. The system makes combat feel more like a fencing duel rather than an exercise in button mashing. I have to read my opponents and respond accordingly.
But because I’m so focused on that reading, I often lose track of how much health I have and exactly how many enemies are around me. I have died more times to wolf fangs than any of Dawnwalker’s vampire fangs.