This game is like the complete inverse of a polished turd, whatever that is. A diamond that's covered in turd. Or a turd with a lot of value. I dunno. It's an incredibly trashy game, but it's the kind of deliberate trashiness you watch movies like The Crow for, that specific *goth* trashiness. Like what Wuthering Heights was to people in the victorian era before we called it classic literature. It's the most gothic game I've ever played, and easily my favorite thing about it.
First of all, there's a bunch of licensed music in this game, and a bunch of posters of actual, real life bands. Bands everyone knows like Lacuna Coil or Daniel Ash (of Bauhaus; both of whom's music is featured in the game) standing alongside obviously very local acts to California, where both Troika Games was and the game itself is based. Notably, there's not really much goth rock that sprung up in the early 2000s, what was on the rise was mainly darkwave, on the goth side, and industrial acts as well as a ton of gothic metal. This is reflected pretty well in the game.
But it's not just in the wealth of alternative music presented, which, of course, are shown off mostly in the various clubs associated with each hub world. The whole aesthetic is like that. One of those aforementioned clubs is a broken down Church repurposed, ominous, huge windows glaring red down onto the streets below it. Some of the NPCs hanging around in or on the streets may be covered in corpse paint and electro-shocked hair or wearing leather and studded belts. Let alone the various dealings of the supernatural, one whole mission is set in a haunted mansion.
And it's about vampires, so that helps. The absolute epitome of haunted by the past sins of your ancestors and melodrama and romance. It's gothic down to its core. It's the world and characters from here I think of when I go into my playlists of goth or industrial. I've scoured the depths of discogs for this kind of thing.
Besides all that goth stuff, it's dingy urban California. The actual soundtrack that plays complements it in a noir-esque manner, mostly low rumbling bass and cautious drums. Stringy guitars or synths may come in to accent it with something melancholic, and when you enter combat the beat will shift to more of of a frantic shuffling with more distortion. It's minimalistic, but very well-made, and it elevates to a higher level paired with hearing your enemies voice their uneasiness they feel that night as you stalk them.
There's something suspicious in the air of California these past few nights, everyone can feel it. To this end, everyone is hiding something, you'll never truly be aware of how far down the rabbithole goes. There's a lot of trust in the way it's written to allow for the player to come to their own conclusions. You'll get many hints and tons of perspectives, but it's down entirely to who you trust more and what you believe. It's also not afraid to abuse that freedom against the player, which might have you manipulated you into a less than satisfying ending.
It's an engaging plot of political intrigue. At worst I think it gets a bit old hat, as you do chase a single plot thread for an overlong length of time, though I figure it's meant to be thematic. You don't get much choice in the main story, it culminates in a final choice. The manipulation *is* a big theme, too, it's just a bit jarring sometimes where the only way forward is helping the same one guy you may not trust. From here, we're sort of getting into the territory of this game's developmental struggle and how it affected the game.
Getting it in before that, this game's writing is very good, still. Characters are subtly nuanced, conveyed primarily in their speech, how you interact with them. There's a good variety of them, too, offering several perspectives on their drifting humanity and their vampirism, as well as thoughts on each main faction. My favorites comes from the Hollywood section, where their dealings are more geared towards the struggles of it, since Hollywood is infested with hunters even though it's home to probably the most spirited vampires in their society. It's sad.
For all those very high points, this game is extremely janky. It drags down almost every aspect of it. For context, it's practically a requirement to patch this game with the Unofficial Patch by Wesp5 (who seems to be a very polite person from what I've seen). I did this on the 'basic' version first—the patch comes with a 'plus' version that includes a ton of restored content—but there's only so much you can fix for this game. I've fallen through floors, gotten stuck, sometimes when I loaded an area I would shoot off my gun from no input, which would immediately incur a criminal violation and have the cops after me. Many things that are out of scope for a single fan patch, too.
Cutscenes are awfully wonky animation-wise, they'll often enough just have things happen right off-screen and it comes off very awkward. Even what they do show is already extremely stilted. That's something I can ignore well enough personally. Much, much worse for me is the awful mixing. Remember everything I said about the music and ambience being great? They all drown each other out, with no option provided to the player to adjust it aside from master volume. Echo effects are broken without another patch. Voice acting ranges from, "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this guy is from Futurama," to the Troika studio janitor, or perhaps close cousin.
Chinatown in particular is a masterclass of the latter, pretty much every character that speaks another language has terrible pronunciation and are obviously not speakers of it. There's a Japanese girl, who, based on my dialogue options, is not meant to be a native English speaker. This is while she completely botches her pronunciation of words by adding English stress rules to them and speaking without a hint of an accent.
Worst of all, the combat. It's fine for the earlier half, the levels are more deliberately designed for a variety of options, so you can excuse that it's not particularly well-made. However, as the game goes on and the money runs dry, it has a tendency to overvalue combat over other options. About a third of the way in, you get a gigantic maze-like sewer level ('maze-like sewer level' should automatically set off alarm bells, anyway, but I digress) with two bosses who simply become regular enemies for the remainder of its length. You do not get any options other than fighting or sneaking.
Talking to people, your speech skills, are evidently the best part of Bloodlines' gameplay. These are the directors of the original Fallout, of course this is their priority and what will come out the best. If you intimidate someone, you might get what you want, but that NPC may turn on you if you come back to them. Persuasion is often as simple as, 'press the blue text,' and occasionally it's a puzzle of picking the right choice to legitimately convince the NPC of what you're saying, which makes speech fairly tense. Seduction can lead into this as well, while giving you easy methods to refuel your blood without risking the masquerade.
That's not even going over how some vampire clans have unique dialogue choices specific to them or their discipline. How characters may not like you based on the clan you picked or vice versa.
This game is the absolute ideal of a reactive world. In my opinion, that's leagues more immersive than games that try to simulate a living world by the breadth of content within them. Such games tend to turn out ankle-deep, more fun for the merit of messing around in as they offer little to engage with. Bloodlines is the opposite end of that. There's no open world, yet outside Fallout: New Vegas and other cRPGs, I'd have a hard time listing any RPG with such a memorable world as in this one. Unfortunately it's harmed a decent amount as it peters out in its final moments, perhaps going on just a bit *too* long.
Also, bhopping. So, like, 10/10.
