Konrad Tomaszkiewicz spent a decade directing other people’s vampires and witchers before deciding to build his own. Rebel Wolves’ debut, The Blood of Dawnwalker, is exactly what you’d expect from a studio founded by the ex-Witcher 3 director and a chunk of his old team: a story-first RPG with genuinely great writing, wrapped around a couple of systems that needed one more year in the oven. A million copies sold in three days says the name still opens doors. Whether the game earns that on its own terms is a separate question, and the answer is mostly yes, with caveats big enough that I’d want you to know about them before you buy in.
That pedigree cuts both ways, and it’s worth saying plainly rather than tiptoeing around it. A studio built on Witcher 3 alumni invites Witcher 3 comparisons whether it wants them or not, and Dawnwalker doesn’t win that fight on systems — it wins it on the strength of what it’s actually trying to do differently. This isn’t a Witcher clone with fangs. It’s a tighter, more personal story wrapped in a curse mechanic no CD Projekt game has ever attempted, and judging it as « the new Witcher » misses what’s actually interesting about it.
Sangora Valley is the best thing here
The setting is the strongest card Rebel Wolves is holding. Sangora Valley folds ancient Greek and West Asian mythology into a Carpathian duchy without it ever feeling like a mood board — hidden monster lore sits next to lived-in medieval politics, and the two coexist more convincingly than they have any right to. Coen’s fight to save his family gives the plot a personal, driving spine rather than the usual « chosen one saves the world » scaffolding, and the side characters and romances carry real emotional weight: one relationship in particular is going to stick with people long after the credits, and it earns that weight through dialogue rather than through a cutscene telling you how to feel.
The vampire powers built on top of that world are the other genuine highlight: teleporting through smoke, walking on ceilings, evisceration attacks that turn night encounters into something faster and nastier than the day-time swordplay. When the writing and the vampire fantasy line up, and for long stretches they do, this is one of the better RPGs of the year, full stop. The side quests hold up their end too: they’re built around Sangora Valley’s own folklore rather than generic fetch-and-return busywork, which matters more than it sounds like it should in a genre where most side content exists purely to pad the map.
The curse mechanic: ambitious idea, uneven execution
The whole game is built around a ticking clock: a curse that turns every in-game night into a countdown against Coen’s own transformation, with a hard 30-day limit pushing you to prioritize quests, powers, and relationships instead of hoovering up every icon on the map. On paper, that’s the single most interesting design decision in the game, and it does what it’s supposed to: no two playthroughs will look the same, and it forces the kind of meaningful choice most open-world RPGs are too scared to ask of players.
In practice, opinion is split, and not without reason. Combat itself is genuinely good in the moment: the directional blocking during day fights has real weight to it, closer to For Honor than to the usual RPG button-mashing, but enemy variety runs thin fast, and the vampire combat kit feels noticeably less developed than the human side, which is the wrong half to shortchange in a game about becoming a monster. Add in NPCs who barely react to how far you lean into the vampire side of Coen’s identity, and the systems around that excellent curse concept start to feel thinner than the concept deserves. It’s telling that a chunk of the PC playerbase modded the timer out entirely within days of launch, not because the idea is bad, but because the game doesn’t always make good on the tension it promises. A mechanic this ambitious needed either deeper consequences for how you spend your nights, or a lot more vampire-specific content to spend them on. Right now it has neither, and that’s the single biggest gap between what Dawnwalker is reaching for and what it actually delivers.
Rough around the edges, technically
Frame rate dips into the low 30s in busier locations like Svartrau, facial animation can be stiff in conversations that deserve better after how well they’re written, and navigation occasionally glitches in ways that break immersion at the worst moments. PC players have it worse at launch: shader compilation crashes on some Intel setups, stuttering in windowed and borderless mode (full-screen is the current workaround), and a PS5 controller remap option that’s still missing entirely. Accessibility hasn’t gotten much attention either: subtitle and UI text scaling options are absent, which is a real problem for a game this dialogue-heavy. Rebel Wolves has already acknowledged all of this publicly and is patching, and to their credit the communication has been fast and specific rather than defensive. But « launch in full-screen to avoid crashes » isn’t something a paying customer should have to already know on day one, and a first-time studio doesn’t get infinite goodwill on that front just because the writing team delivered.
Our take
Critics landed all over the map on this one, everywhere from 6 to 10 out of 10, and that spread is honest, not confused: The Blood of Dawnwalker is a genuinely great story wearing a good-not-great open-world RPG as a costume. The writing, the setting, and the vampire fantasy are good enough on their own to justify the price of entry, and they’re the reason this lands solidly in recommended territory rather than merely correct-but-flawed. The combat’s shallow enemy variety, the curse system’s unfinished follow-through, and the technical state at launch are exactly where a studio’s first game usually shows its seams, and none of them are dealbreakers on their own, but together they’re enough to keep this out of coup-de-cœur territory.
Rebel Wolves is already talking about a sequel, and if the pattern holds, a strong idea that needs a sturdier frame around it, that sequel is where this saga could go from « very good debut » to genuinely great. For now: play it for Coen’s story and for Sangora Valley. Go in knowing the systems wrapped around them haven’t fully caught up yet, and don’t expect the curse timer to be the tense, ever-present threat the marketing promised. It’s the seed of something excellent rather than the finished thing, and for a first game from a brand-new studio, that’s still worth your time and your money.