Originally published at: https://www.choiceofgames.com/2024/05/33-off-choice-of-the-vampire/
Choice of the Vampire is 33% off until May 23, including its two game-length DLCs, The Fall of Memphis and St. Louis, Unreal City.
Slake your thirst—without becoming a monster! Blessed with the blood-soaked gift of immortality, will you tend the flock of humanity—or twist it to your whims? When a brash young country clashes with a brash young vampire, who will come out ahead?
Choice of the Vampire is an epic interactive novel by Jason Stevan Hill. It’s entirely text-based, 900,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Announcing St. Louis, Unreal City four years late
If you hadn’t heard about St. Louis, Unreal City, well, you’re not alone. We quietly made it available to the public in 2020, but we’ve never officially announced it until today.
With the turning of the century, St. Louis sits at the navel of the United States. The elite of the city celebrate by throwing the party of all parties—the 1904 World’s Fair. Every vampire who is any vampire will be there!
As your character concludes their first century of unlife, they must navigate the waters of industrialization and urbanization. But a monster roams the Missouri countryside, hunting vampires. Will the vampire court of St. Louis tear itself apart even before he comes for their heartsblood? And how can this unreal city look to the future when the specters of the past refuse to stay dead?
It took four years to get ready to make this announcement
It took a long, long time to prepare for this announcement, because Choice of the Vampire is one of the most complicated games we’ve ever published, offering an unprecedented variety in the type of vampire you can be.
For example, when you first become a vampire during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, you can choose from a dozen wildly different human backgrounds. You can be a Choctaw interpreter, a French landowner, a Free Person of Color, an ordained priest, an Irish laborer, a Yankee entrepreneur, and many more.
Your choice of background affects the entire rest of the game, as you live through a hundred years of American history. Each background engages differently with the Civil War, Reconstruction, the liberation of Haiti, the Exodusters, Cuba, lynchings, and vodou. Your character may or may not be literate, may or may not speak English, French, German, Latin, Spanish, or Choctaw.
Furthermore, you might have been turned into a vampire by one of six different vampires, each with their own unique background, and, besides that, you might decide to kill your maker in the first five minutes of the game, or flee New Orleans entirely, playing an alternate version of the first part of the game in the village of St. Charles.
This complexity affects every part of the game; the longer the game gets, the more complex it becomes.
Initially, we thought we’d “soft launch” the St. Louis DLC, fix up any bugs that users reported, and do a a proper announcement a week or two later. Well, here we are, four years later, and we’re finally ready to announce it.
We can’t say that a game like this will ever be truly bug free, but we think it’s ready for you now.
If you’ve never played it, we can’t wait for you to try it. If you’ve played before, we invite you to return to one of the most replayable games we’ve ever made.
