The Blood of Dawnwalker Review

Note: this article contains story details from the opening hours of The Blood of Dawnwalker.

The Blood of Dawnwalker, the debut from a studio built by former CD Projekt Red staff, is a dark fantasy open-world RPG that wears its influences openly and still manages to feel genuinely fresh. It nearly always pulls off what it attempts.

The comparisons to The Witcher 3 have followed this game everywhere ahead of launch, and understandably so. Director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and many of his former CD Projekt Red colleagues are behind it, and the game clearly aims for a similar experience — an earthy, grounded medieval world touched by the supernatural, populated by blunt-talking peasants, scored with Polish folk music, and structured around similar interfaces and combat. Even the grim tone carries over.

For anyone who loves The Witcher 3, that's a powerful starting point. The danger is falling short of the comparison. Dawnwalker largely clears that bar, and it does so while adding ideas of its own.

Two Characters in One

The central twist is right there in the title: you play Coen, a young man in 1347 Carpathian Mountains who has been partially turned into a vampire. Something halted his transformation, so he keeps the ability to function in daylight. The result is a protagonist with two forms — vampire at night, human by day — that switch automatically with the time of day.

It's a smart solution to a long-running open-world RPG problem: variety. By day, Coen travels on foot like anyone else, but he also wields potent witchcraft — slowing time to sprint like The Flash, speaking to the dead, performing rituals. By night, walls and cliff faces mean nothing. He climbs them, teleports across rooftops and hunts from above, which transforms the central city of Svartraau's dense rooftop sprawl into a second layer of the world that daytime Coen can't touch.

Some activities demand night-time mobility; others require walking among the living. The two skill trees are mutually exclusive, bridged by a shared swordsmanship tree.

You Control the Clock

The second big idea is time itself. Dawnwalker doesn't advance unless you let it. Quests each cost segments on a time gauge, and the story hands you 30 in-game days and nights to deal with what's happened to Coen's family.

Early on, the countdown looms more than it pressures. But as days burn away — 30 becomes 20 becomes 15 — a low-grade panic sets in, and it works. Time suddenly has weight: an NPC saying "come back tomorrow" becomes a real decision. It's a far cry from Skyrim, where the world simply waits.

There's no traditional main quest steering you through the valley of Sangora. Instead, level design and questlines quietly guide you while leaving the final confrontation entirely to your judgement. I tested that freedom at the halfway mark on Fair difficulty: in human form, I was flattened. In vampire form, thanks to life-gain abilities, I fought through to the ending — triggering an achievement and an epilogue that made clear how much I'd skipped.

That's Dawnwalker's sharpest tension. Narratively, racing to save your family should feel heroic, yet the game also nudges you for leaving content untouched. It's a clash between story and RPG structure, but the audacity is admirable. "When do I attempt the end?" is a far more interesting question than "when will the game let me?"

Where It Stumbles

Repetition does creep in. The valley is visually varied but ultimately samey, enemy variety is limited, and once the directional-block combat clicks, damage-sponge enemies turn fights mildly gruelling. That said, the block system rewards well-timed directional matches — or you can "omniblock" — and enemies never dogpile simultaneously, a welcome fix to a Witcher 3 frustration. Quests are uniformly strong, and a clever notoriety system tied to the villain's generals gives exploration real purpose: anger them enough and they come hunting you.

Dawnwalker is a confident, occasionally brilliant debut that earns its comparisons — and a game worth playing more than once.

Source: the original publisher