Loose Ends

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Average Rating:

(I beta tested this game)

So far in this festival we’ve seen games that seem to be about politics but aren’t (Potato Peace, Pass a Bill) and games that seem to be about politics and are (Social Democracy, Dragon of Steelthorne sorta); Loose Ends completes the set, being a game that doesn’t seem to be about politics but actually 100% is (I suppose there are also a bunch of games that neither seem to be nor are about politics, but that’s a singularly unedifying line of inquiry). It’s about vampires, you see, but not just any vampires: these are the Kindred of the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire: the Masquerade, which can be played in a variety of styles ranging from angsty personal horror (…or so I’ve heard) to superheroes with fangs (definitely played in a few campaigns like this), but always foregrounds the complex web of relationships, feuds, and factions that dominates the endless unlives of the titular immortals.

The game does a good job of letting you slowly wade into the deep end of the pool, though. You’re a newcomer to town who gets hired for a classic Vampire task, a Masquerade cleanup: some chump of a vampire’s revealed their supernatural powers to mortals, leaving witnesses and evidence, and it’s up to you to preserve the secrecy of undead society by seeing to the requisite disappearances and threats. The early stages of the game therefore unfurl as an investigation, as you follow the schmendrick’s tracks and try to figure out exactly how big of a mess has been made. But it doesn’t take long to realize that, again in classic V:tM style, the job isn’t on the level and by nosing around, you’ve inadvertently put yourself into grave (groan) danger. As the game progresses, gameplay shifts from finding evidence or persuading witnesses to strategizing about trading favors: there are a wealth of characters representing a wide number of factions, most of whom hate each others’ guts, and sharing resources, information, or promises with some of them will help unlock secrets, or lend you mundane or supernatural aid. It all comes to a crescendo in a final conflict that turns less on whether you’ve sussed out the mystery than if you’ve made any allies who’ll care enough to keep you from getting squashed by a bug.

The interface does a good job of helping you master the array of options and information at your disposal; each night, you’re given a choice of locations to visit, and also the chance to review your resources and what you’ve learned. Gameplay largely proceeds via standard choice-based gameplay, but with clearly-marked places where your choice of focus attributes and vampire powers unlock new options. When it comes time to offer a favor, you always have a chance to back down and change your mind; likewise, while the game does have an overall time limit, it’s fairly forgiving and runs partially according to the rules of drama rather than a strict clock. As a result the game feels quite fair, even as the social-engineering puzzle it presents can be quite challenging to navigate.

The characters are a highlight, brought to life by evocative prose and well-chosen dialogue. They tend a bit to the stereotypical, if you’ve played the tabletop game, since most stand in as single representatives for their faction, but they’re all well done, and there are some who stand out as individuals, like the freethinking university professor or the alchemy-dabbling painter and her making-a-series-of-bad-decisions lover. And I’d imagine they make the cavalcade of political groups a little easier to navigate for newcomers to the World of Darkness, by personalizing the factions – in fact overall I think the game does a good job of explaining itself and not presupposing prior knowledge of the setting (if anything, I might have wrong-footed myself through my familiarity with older versions of Vampire: in my first playthrough, I caught wind of the hideout of a Sabbat cabal. Seeing as they’re a sect of vampires whose cruelty and fanaticism are so extreme that I’m struggling to come up with a plausible real-world analogy, I steered well clear. But when I visited them in a subsequent save-file there was just a tense conversation waiting for me, reflecting I think that the Sabbat have been toned down in recent editions).

I can still see Loose Ends not being for everyone: the web of information and relationships is tricky to navigate successfully, and if you’re interested in the personal-horror aspect of vampirism, your thirsts will largely go unslaked – there’s no existential angst here, and heck, feeding on the blood of the living is mostly something that gets taken care of in a perfunctory paragraph between chapters. But if the idea of trying to use your wits to survive jaded immortals’ games of feint and counter-feint, look no further.

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