Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 are among the best games released in the past decade, giant RPGs with plenty of content and replayability. Now, the team behind them and their new studio, Rebel Wolves, are creating The Blood of Dawnwalker, a medieval RPG featuring vampires and other night horrors.
Admittedly, I was a bit skeptical before diving into my 3-hour gameplay session, but I came out astounded. Coen is a likable protagonist, and the worldbuilding is sublime. It could be 2026’s surprise hit, and that’s saying something considering all of the incredible games we’ve gotten so far.
We also spoke with senior quest designer Patryk Fijalkowski and environmental artist Adam Payet about the game’s notable time management elements, its design inspirations, and how the narrative unfolds.
The Blood of Dawnwalker follows a young man named Coen who gets turned into a half vampire hybrid and has 30 days to rescue his family from Bencis, the ruthless leader of immortal vampires called the Vrakhiri. During the first half of my demo, Coen is just a normal human who’s taking care of his family. Coen can take on different tasks and side quests, but each of them uses up a segment of your day.
While many associate time management gameplay mechanics with games like Persona, Rebel Wolves actually took inspiration from Fallout 2. In that game, when you exit the vault, a timer constantly ticks down.
“This was [director] Konrad's big inspiration. Not just him, but myself as well,” Payet said. “A lot of the Rebel Wolves are fans of old school approaches, so this feels like a natural step to bring that kind of mechanic into modern titles.”
Since you only have a limited amount of time to explore or tackle quests, you won’t see everything in a single playthrough. That might instill a sense of FOMO, but the developers are okay with it. “We are okay with people not seeing things because they decided to go a certain way,” Fijalkowski added. “I think it will be really great when people play the game and then talk to each other and see the different outcomes.”
During my demo playthrough, Coen gathered the ingredients and instructions to create a remedy to heal his despondent mother, Esme. However, I wasn’t paying full attention to the instructions. The only specific step I remembered was that it needed hot water, not boiling. But I couldn’t remember how many herbs I needed to add. So I took a guess, and the consequences of my actions didn't manifest until a little later.
The Vrakhiri have given Coen’s village some benefits, including instant healing via their supernatural blood and shelter from taxes, in exchange for worship. Sounds great, right? But the group’s leader, Bencis, wants irrelevant praise, and he’s not afraid to cut down anyone who doesn’t provide that.
Bencis also hates weak people, and seeing a dejected Esme angered him. After I used up all of my existing time, the story shifted to a church at night. Esme wouldn’t sing her praises to the Vrakhiri, so Bencis’ inner circle completely devoured her in a bloody feast, leaving the rest of the villagers frightened. It turns out, the mother can actually survive the church scene if you give her the right combination of herbs in the remedy, which apparently I didn’t!
“Everything you do contributes to the main quest. This was also a really important factor when we were designing the quests,” Fijalkowski explained. “So you're not feeling like you are losing time, you just invest it.
The morning after the church scene, Coen decides to join a rebellion against the Vakhiri, despite their differences in strength. The rebellion ends up being a trap, and Bencis takes a bite out of a dying Coen, turning him into a vampire.
Here, I finally got a taste of Coen’s vampiric abilities, which include short-range teleportation, claw strikes, and sucking on enemy necks to heal himself. One common criticism of The Witcher 3 is that its combat wasn’t the best. To some players, it felt flimsy. But in The Blood of Dawnwalker, the combat feels a bit more refined and free-flowing, which shows that Rebel Wolves incorporated feedback.
Upon reaching his village, Coen sees that Bencis set it entirely on fire as revenge for its inhabitants’ insubordination. People are dying around him, with several charred corpses already on the ground. As I made my way through, I confronted and fought Bencis. I already knew this was a battle that I was meant to lose, as I barely did any damage while he was chopping off chunks of my HP with each hit.
I did lose, but both Fijalkowski and Payet confirmed that Bencis can be beaten in this initial encounter, which triggers an early end. The Blood of Dawnwalker has lots of replayability due to how many different events can play out, so you might think it’d be short with tons of reused assets to save on time and money. But they’re saying that one playthrough could be estimated around 50 hours. Even if you don’t replay it, Payet said not to worry. “It's still a fully contained story with a beginning, middle, and a conclusion,” he explained.
Fijalkowski added, “Unless you kill Brencis in the prologue, which is possible. It’s one of the endings, I mean, good luck!”
As Brencis is about to kill Coen, he tastes his new vampiric blood, but is disgusted by it. Having never experienced that before, he threatens to experiment on Coen to find out exactly what is going on. However, the sun miraculously rises, forcing him to retreat and leave Coen for dead.
But strangely, Coen recovers, hinting at his unique human and vampire hybrid status. During the day, he’s human, but at night, he transforms into his monstrous form.
I was then unleashed into the open world, where I took the time to explore. What struck me about the time management is that now I have both day and night to tackle quests and objectives. In games with similar mechanics, you typically only have the day, and then sleep during the night. But here, Coen never sleeps. This was a lot more freeing than I even imagined. When it’s daytime, Coen fights in his human form with his sword, and at night, he can unleash hell with his fangs out.
The time management feature is the defining mechanic that separates The Blood of Dawnwalker from its RPG contemporaries, and it looks like it's been expertly implemented, with aspects I’m excited to explore further. Rebel Wolves was founded in 2022, and it’s impressive that the game gives such a strong impression with just the prologue.
“We had those four years, but we didn't have an infinite budget,” Fijalkowski explained, “So sometimes we had to get creative in how we figured those problems out, but at the end of the day, I think we managed to do it.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker launches on September 3 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
