Uh oh. You don’t want Little Jimmy with the nervous disposition clapping eyes on this one. Dontnod Entertainment’s upcoming Vampyr is going all out with the adults-only content.
It’s really no surprise. After all, this is some dark subject matter we’re dealing with here. Vampyr is the tale of Jonathan Reid, a London doctor during the devastating Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. While tending to a patient, he’s bitten, henceforth becoming a vampire. Because… you know, that’s apparently a thing that can happen. We’ve all heard terrible things about the pandemic that hit just at the close of World War One, but seriously.
As Reid, then, we’re left to grapple with all kinds of moral decisions. To feed or not to feed, as Shakespeare once (well, more or less) wrote.
The game is very dialogue decision heavy, which is no surprise coming from the creators of the much-loved Life is Strange. You’re relatively free to roam around London, gather information about the different residents, and determine the best methods of feeding on them without attracting undue attention to yourself. This is how you access and advance along the skill tree, but the developers claim that you’re able to complete the game without taking a single life. Super tough, but doable.
As you can tell from the screenshots and the premise itself, then, this is no super happy Barney the Dinosaur of a title. It’s dark, brooding and darn violent in places. As such, the ESRB weren’t going to slap an E for Everybody on this bad boy. Not by the longest of chalks.
The ESRB have released their rating for Vampyr, and sure enough, it’s an M for Mature all the way. That was a given, really, but reading the rating summary in detail, it’s actually quite surprising just how far the developers are going with this one.
We’re ticking almost all the boxes here. The kind of violence that Mortal Kombat would be proud of (‘Some sequences depict -brutal offings- of characters on and off-screen—a man’s decapitated head appears on the ground,’ we’re promised), in tandem with some grotesque and vicious enemies to tango with too. You’ll be propositioned by ladies of the night, ingest some questionable substances in graphic detail, and use the kind of language that’d have your grandma rinsing your mouth out with soap.
Certain other acts are performed and referenced that go even beyond that, as you can see if you hit the link to the ESRB’s rating.
This intriguing action RPG is set to launch on June 5. In the interim, you can check out DTakes23’s guide to everything we know so far right here (NSFW).
