Last Updated on August 22, 2025 by Angel Melanson
In 2022, former CD Projekt employees founded Rebel Wolves, a new studio aiming to make dark fantasy games. With developers holding years of experience under the phenomenal The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077, it looks like Rebel Wolves is poised for success.
The studio's first game, The Blood of Dawnwalker, was first revealed in January this year. Its dark fantasy medieval setting is filled with vampires, monsters, and other haunted creatures, that is quite an aesthetic departure from what these developers created before.
FANGORIA had the opportunity to check out The Blood of Dawnwalker in a hands-off demo and came away intrigued with its emphasis on the day and night cycle, and how it impacts our vampiric protagonist, Coen.
The game takes place in a fictional 14th-century kingdom called Vale Sangora, and Coen has been turned into a Dawnwalker, a sort of vampiric and human hybrid. This gives him different abilities during the day, when he's a human, and at night, when his dark vampire powers arise. His main goal is to rescue his family within 30 days while dealing with Brencis, a vampire who has Vale Sangora under an oppressive rule.
In the demo, we saw that there were 22 days remaining, and The Blood of Dawnwalker structure takes surprising inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. According to the developers, Coen can go straight to the end to save his family, just like players could with Link and defeat Calamity Ganon in Nintendo's open-world game. This could make The Blood of Dawnwalker a sleeper hit within the speedrunning community, with players continually finding new tricks and methods to finish the game as quickly as possible.
Pursuing different side quests or activities takes up a chunk of time within those 30 days, which reminded me of Persona games. Although we've yet to see the full extent of The Blood of Dawnwalker's time management systems, the mechanic requires players to make strategic decisions about what quests or tasks to prioritize. This could lead to more replayability in the future, ensuring that not every playthrough is exactly the same.
In terms of Coen's abilities, he has a unique set of skills depending on whether he's in his human or Dawnwalker forms. During the day, Coen will have to talk to NPCs to investigate certain issues, but at night, players will have the opportunity to utilize the brute force of his supernatural powers. Certain objectives can only be explicitly done during either day or night, so when you attempt to tackle a certain quest can lead to different outcomes.
In this demo, we saw Coen investigate a missing person's case by walking around and following leads from other characters. While he's limited on his vampiric powers during the day, he can still use magic. One particular spell, called Compel Soul Hex, lets Coen briefly reanimate corpses to get information out of them. After seeing the spell play out, this assured me that playing as human Coen wasn't going to be as boring as just simply walking around asking questions.
The highlight of the demo was witnessing the different vampiric abilities that Coen had access to. For example, Planeshift lets him walk on walls and ceilings while Shadowstep lets him teleport to nearby places within his reach. I didn't really see too many of these supernatural skills in action, but so far, I'm intrigued.
One thing I was worried about was whether the human and Dawnwalker dichotomy would railroad players into a specific playstyle. For example, in franchises like Mass Effect or Infamous, there are morality systems that judge whether you performed “good” or “bad” actions. Depending on your decisions, they can alter the story and ending. And as a result, you may be forced to play a certain way in order to achieve certain objectives.
However, the developers told me that there's no such morality system in The Blood of Dawnwalker. Although being partially a vampire, Coen will still have to satiate his need for human blood. In fact, according to publisher Bandai Namco's website, if Coen doesn't drink enough blood, it could impact the fate of an important story character. However, that seems to be as far as this mechanic extends.
“It's not a system per se. It's no light side, dark side, and getting points, moving on a scale,” Rebel Wolves told me. “But yes, if you do not take care of your blood hunger, you will be in for a nasty surprise of what Coen is doing, because he's essentially a beast, and he might lose control of himself.”
One last thing I'm a bit cautious about is the game's combat. During the demo, we saw Coen fight against a few supernatural monsters, including a pale creature called the Almshouse Monstrosity. Here, Coen fought with a sword, and it looked a bit unwieldy. I could sense a feeling of heaviness to the weapons that I'm sure I'll have to get used to, compared to other action games. But I'm impressed by how the camera kept up with the game's lock-on mechanic, which will definitely help the flow of battle feel smoother.
Still, this was a hands-off demo, and I'll reserve my full judgment for when I can actually get my hands on a controller to see how it feels. Hopefully, the game plays as alluring as it looks. There's plenty of time to iron out the kinks. The Blood of Dawnwalker launches in 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
