Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives

tehee

Really good.

Starts of intriguing, but falls apart at the end

inject this ♥♥♥♥ straight into my bloodstream

Easily the best VTM interactive novel in my opinion. The story itself was great and the varied different endings and how you got to gave it enough replayability on its own. With the endings as well just how it lets you be truly evil or step over characters to get an ending where you had more power, or one where you were happier felt great. Plus all the different clans felt good, most differences just came down to flavour text or different powers however a few changed the story quite a lot and I was very happy with all the extra story if you play as a lasombra and how that is handled in a camarilla territory. Easy to recommend.

Як гра - не так багато дає, як Night Road, але написано непогано. Політичний детектив. Цікава інтерактивна книга.

Connections between scenes via choices were too vague, sometimes there'd be choices using information i'm pretty sure I didn't have as a reader, and overall the relationships built throughout the game felt very superficial. Instead of having multiple stories based on your path it felt like getting a single chopped up story that was much less compelling.

*I can't write a review on the DLC, so I'll put it here. I bought this game for one reason: to yell Shakespearean nonsense at NPCs and somehow accurately predict the future. I loved doing this in the original [i]Vampire: The Masquerade[/i]. I was heartbroken to hear that [i]The Masquerade 2[/i] no longer cares about story telling nor dialogue. And I am disappointed in this game for false advertising. For those who don't know the lore, the Malkavian vampire faction are utterly mad poets, and I love them for it. But this games lackluster version of Malkavian is just the original game with an "imaginary friend" who occasionally interrupts the original dialogue. [b]Prophets BEWARE! Thou empty vessel shalt find no verbal solace in false bindings. For thy pages are of dullards masquerading under one you do not seek. [/b]

Alright, CoG, you did a pretty decent job with this one, making it the second VTM game of yours that I can say I'd recommend, and I'd do so with far less reservations than I had with Night Road. To be honest, there's flaws with the game, and they bear mentioning. There's some awkward transitions to scenes after choices have been made, places where more editing effort could've been made so it felt like an organic flow of situations evolving, rather than a hard cut of "here's the results of what you just clicked". Sometimes it's obvious that the story is on the rails and a choice you just made doesn't matter because the next lines route you to the same direction other options would have, including sometimes making you ask/do the exact things that those other options offered up and you hadn't picked. Or I told Jordan that I wasn't planning on going for a hunt that evening (especially because my stat for hunger was as low as it could be at the time), yet the next screen has a menu asking me where I want to go hunting and no options not to. There's also some really questionable prose choices, leading me to want to ask the writer things like, "how exactly does a semi-automatic 'bristle', pray tell, you silly sausage?" Or "in a single sentence you used multiple weapon metaphors to describe the protag simply running, trying to make it seem more badass. Doesn't that seem a bit excessive, especially when a few minutes later you're talking about how long it's been since they were out of the office and having blood dolls brought to them, so their skills are rusty AF." Thankfully, a lot of the eyebrow raising wording is concentrated into the first two chapters, and vastly improves after those. By the fourth chapter, I was immersed enough in the story to no longer feel like I should be taking notes to have the citations for a potentially negative review. While the hard cuts can be spotted throughout the entire story, the plot itself is relatively well written and the characters have distinct personalities and personal motivations that don't come off like tired tropes. There's still hallmarks of various clans showing in their respective characters, making it apparent that they were written with thought to lore and why they'd have been embraced by their different factions, but they avoid coming off like stereotypes. Well done on that front. And even if sometimes your choices blatantly don't matter, there's plenty of times where they clearly did, even if you don't see the results until later in the story. I don't want to spoil the plot, even if this game has been out for a long while now, but it was interesting to see how the situation was shaped by the choices made. Besides playing the first Bloodlines to death and it remaining my all time favorite VtM game, I've also played Coteries, Shadows, Night Road, and Out for Blood. Out of those latter four CYOA novels and this game- I'd rank this one as having the best plot and narrative branchings of the five. I'll be going back through at some point in the future to uncover other endings that weren't so obvious and see other sides of characters left unexplored. Thanks for finally delivering a VtM installment that was actually worth the time and money to play; I only wish that wasn't such a rare thing to have happen.