Cabernet

Its a fun game, and should be a recommend... but it has so many bugs and issues. I had to roll back to a prior saved well over a dozen times because loading into an event or dialogue would just make everything impossible to interact with. I became frozen on screens multiple times and had all sort of game breaking bugs, If you decide to play save it every day on a new slot and try to minimize overwriting.

This is one of the best vampire games I have ever played. And I want to be precise about why, because it is not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, there are the usual decisions. You can be a vampire vegetarian, subsisting on the bare minimum and preserving your conscience along with it. You can be a predator: cold, controlled, bending mortals to your will with a glance and feeling very smug about it. You can be the kind of vampire that manipulates entire social situations from across a dinner table like a chess grandmaster. The game accommodates all of this and lets you feel powerful and clever and occasionally monstrous about it. But what Cabernet actually understands, what it is quietly, insistently about, is that the real horror isn't the fangs. The horror is being invited into rooms that have existed for centuries and slowly realizing that the power structures inside them are older and far crueler than anything supernatural. Your immortality doesn't make you free. It mostly means you get to watch humanity grind itself down across an infinite loop of the same mistakes, the same hierarchies, the same willingness of the powerful to consume the vulnerable and call it order. You have forever. You get to see how little changes and how often it doesn't. And then the game asks you what you're going to do about it. That's where it becomes something special. It takes seriously the weight of the power you hold, the sacrifices it demands, the responsibility it carries, the question of whether you use it to protect the people below you or simply add yourself to the architecture of their exploitation. It is a game about whether an immortal being, having seen everything, chooses to be better than the monsters she came from. Not in a grand dramatic way. In the everyday way. In the way of listening, of choosing community over convenience, of daring to believe that change is possible when enough people decide together to be their best selves, to iron out their differences, to cherish what they have, to forgive, to dream. The ending undid me. You return to the city you spent the entire game in: the same streets, the same buildings, but decades later, and changed in every way that matters. You can see the fingerprints of your choices in the shape of the place. People you knew have lived full lives and died, and the game asks you to visit the graveyard and stand at their graves and it gives you a moment with each of them. Their kindness. Their stubbornness. Their ambitions, fulfilled or abandoned or transformed into something neither of you expected. You place flowers and you remember them and the game is completely quiet and it is devastating in the gentlest possible way, the way that only comes when a story has made you genuinely love people who do not exist. It is nostalgic in the truest sense of the word. A longing for a place you have spent time in, for people you have known, filtered through the bittersweet knowledge that time moved forward and you are still here and they are not.

This is one of those games that I mostly enjoyed but just can't recommend until it goes through some serious bug fixes. That extremely short list of beta testers REALLY shows. I constantly ran into situations where the game straight up forgot I had done things. For example, during Alisa's quest, [spoiler] I hadn't spoken to her before Kupala Night, when she resurrected Petya. Then later, Petya wanted to speak to her. I found her at the island, talked to her about the hideout, then told her Petya wanted to talk and so we both got teleported there for that scene. Later, I went back to the island, and the whole scene played out like I had never discovered the hideout, exactly like it did when I first spoke to Alisa. But the game still showed I'd been there and that Alisa and Petya had their talk. [/spoiler] This wasn't the only instance of this happening but it was one of the more obvious ones. It feels like the game has a very specific order it wants you to complete all the quest goals in, and if you break that order even slightly, the game gets really confused. By the time I was on Chapter 6 and had suddenly wound up [spoiler] getting the Puppeteer achievement even though I never spoke with Anastasia about divorcing Evgeny and hadn't even really flirted with her previously since I didn't want to do that while she was married [/spoiler], I decided to not even bother with any more character quests as I was afraid they'd break the game even more and it would ruin whatever ending I would get, so I just hurried to get to the final chapter. Which is disappointing, because I liked a lot of the characters and still wished I could've seen how their stories developed. Maybe you'll have a different experience than I did, but just be aware of these bugs going into the game. A lot of other people seem to have really enjoyed it and mentioned no issues so maybe it's a me problem, but I'm not sure how that happened so... yeah.

A beautifully drawn and hugely underrated time management + puzzle game. It felt lovingly crafted and had a surprising amount of content and small details to discover that lasted me around 16 hours while taking my time. The time management and vampire powers are simple but well implemented to make good use of them, with some clever interactions I didn't expect. The overall tone is pretty tame, however it does work up to some pretty confronting scenes and topics toward the end. There's a huge amount of choices and narrative branches with decently adaptive writing. Characters especially have well developed personalities, and there's a good variety of voices and music. Puzzles are on the easier side but I was mainly hooked on discovering all the consequences and learning the traditional folklore that I haven't seen elswhere before. Ran great on the Deck, especially because using the touch screen for the piano is way better than with a controller.

This game is meant to be enjoyed by people who love story games. I am hoping that more people will give this title a try. The game is fully voice acted, and has a great replay value as I doubt anyone can do 100% of the game on their first blind playthrough. I will say that the elements of horror come in mainly at the end of the game, so if you have an aversion to specific imagery regarding the human body, then you might be better to look at a playthrough to see if you can handle it. All in all a fun game. The protagonist is very much a well written character while leaving enough space for the player to take their own spin on how she interacts with the world around her. Every ending seems entirely possible/equally the true ending.

Fantastic story, endearing art, great characters. Utterly wonderful experience, and a good vampire game. Some bugs here or there that are usually fixed by a reload and some of the pronounciations are painful, but those are small issues. Wonderful narrative game.

what an amazing vampire game! as an estearn european, loved all the eastern european references, and loved that you could be evil in it. as well as loved being able to be a woman and romance two women at once <3

Cannot recommend. Quests easily break, you can only save at a specific locations, story is boring and way too simple, the pacing is terrible. 90% is sleep inducing only at the very it gets a little bit interesting but for only 5 minutes. But the most annoying thing is the very toxic female exceptionalist viewpoint of the developer. Almost all male characters in this game are described as: Cowards, drunks, murderers, cheats, constantly aggressive or so insecure that they need a strong female to guide them and if they are nice and helpful they are gay. I´m seriously not kidding! Almost all female characters are: Strong, intelligent, independent, creative, talented, lesbian (for whatever reason), are oppressed by the male characters/society and so on. Females in desperate need of a power trip while also being lesbian or bi might enjoy their experience but everyone else spent your money elsewhere.

На сегодняшний день актуальная версия 1.2.26, русификатор ломает игру (она крашится). Откатить версию нельзя, а на актуальную игру нет русификатора. Так что если вы думали купить и поиграть на русском языке - сейчас это невозможно, проходите мимо.

oh my.. gothic victorian aesthetic and being a vampire?? literal dream come true loving the story, the characters, even the gameplay is fun, the outfits are so pretty and having the freedom to do whatever + it's not complicated at all and its so fun finding out what the different choices lead to.. even my man got invested on what would happen XD genuinely loving EVERYTHING about this game so far <3 (except the saving part.. which i got used to)