Have You Played Vampire The Masquerade Redemption?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Everyone - including me - bangs on about semi-sequel Bloodlines, but you don't hear much about the first digital adaptation of White Wolf's modern vampires roleplaying game.

I'm probably going to disappoint you, if you've come here looking for meaningfully insight about Redemption. All I'm going to give you is deprecated memories instead. I was hugely excited for Masquerade at the time; never an enormous fan, thematically-speaking, of dungeons and dragons (lower case intentional), so on paper an RPG about vampires and werewolves instantly seemed edgier and stranger. Especially when coupled with then-unusual modern day setting, a dramatic departure from the Christopher Lee in facepaint stereotypes I was accustomed to.

The dismal truth is that I never even saw the modern-day setting. My enthusiasm died in the Dark Ages-set prologue chapter, which was a dry, soulless schlepped with weird controls and a save system the necessitated replaying large sections time and again. I remember some too-hard (at least for me then - I was a cackhanded young gamer) boss getting itself stuck on a gate, allowing me to safely hack it to death, which left me so disappointed in both myself and the game that I walked away from it entirely. I traded it in for Aliens versus Predator, for which I had no regrets.

Yet now I do feel some regret. I wish I could have known what it really was.