Another day, another breakdown of ROs in a Heart’s Choice game. But this time, I am very sleepy due to eating enough Thanksgiving dinner to potentially hibernate through the winter, so I’ll probably get things even more wrong than I normally do!
On the docket today is Vampire’s Kiss, the new kid on the block - it would have been the brand new kid on the block if I had gotten to it on day one, like I originally planned, but things happened that prevented me from getting around to it.
The story of Vampire’s Kiss goes like this:
You are a museum employee in New York, assigned to safely transport a highly valuable item known as the Cross of Aguirre across the pond to an exhibition in London, England. However, you have no sooner landed and been picked up by your security escort than you get caught in a snare and horribly murdered, the Cross of Aguirre stolen, and to further complicate matters, a Mysterious Stranger-
-No, not that guy. But a different Mysterious Stranger appears and dumps a bunch of blood down your throat as you choke to death on your own innards, and twelve hours later, you wake up in a morgue with an ominous voice ringing in your head, three unknown young women trying to kill you (again), oh, and also, you might be a vampire now, minor detail.
One way or another, you make it out ali- er, unalive, and it isn’t long before a fellow vampire tracks you down and properly initiates you into the Masquerade Dance of the Night, bringing you before the Court of London, where you are promptly tasked by the local Prince Marshal with your first mission as a newly-minted vampire: walk your happy little ass back to the morgue and modify your file in the hospital’s systems, because not only is a dead body up and walking around cause for alarm, generally speaking, but you’re wanted in connection to the theft of the Cross of Aguirre in lieu of any other plausible suspects, and the Court of London doesn’t need that kind of heat on their backs.
Thus, the plot of the story begins!
But we’re not here for that, we’re here for the ROs.
Crowd full of strawmen boos in aggravation
Don’t you sass me, made-up naysayers!
This is another HC game where the romance is non-optional, but you can decide how intimate you choose for it to be, which I appreciate.
In a shocking twist for a HC label, you can heavily influence the fates of the ROs in this story, even going so far as potentially getting two of them killed and turning a third into a fellow vampire. Normally in romance-focused games, you don’t tend to have the ability to bump off ROs, typically because the idea is that you want to, you know, romance them. It’s a refreshing change of pace, not gonna lie.
Also, there’s sex. A whole lot of sex. I took part in none of it, because that will forever not be my scene, but I can tell you now, it gets… descriptive.
So, let’s do this in order of appearance:
Marky - Captain Charisma, in the undead flesh. Marky is the vampire who tracks you down after you awaken and escape the morgue, catching you in the act of feeding on a businessman, a barista, or a cat if you would rather try and remain as human as possible (this is important. A certain ending depends on how in touch you are with your humanity). Marky is gender-customizable, but as per usual, I had her set to female. Born a pickpocketing Cockney street urchin in the Victorian Era, Marky’s been at the vampire game for one hundred fifty years and some change, and is the right hand of Fergus Brandfeather, the Marshal of the Court of London. She dresses in the style of a London punk (as in the actual punk scene, I’m not tossing barbs here) and looks to be not a day over twenty, so far as any humans know. She gets assigned as your mentor and helps you find a quiet, dark hidey-hole to nap in during the daytime so you don’t go kablooey in the sunlight - when vampires die in this game, they explode into ash. And I do mean explode.
Marky is pretty easy to get along with, so long as you don’t particularly go out of your way to piss her off. She doesn’t really like being a vampire, per se, but after a hundred and fifty years, she’s pretty well given up on the idea of ever turning back human again, so she’s just getting by day by day as she needs to, although a decent enough relationship with her can reveal that she’s been thinking hard about putting an end to it and greeting the sunrise one last time, because it turns out that immortality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be in the long run. She hates needless violence and cruelty, though she’s a deft hand in a fight, and would prefer to simply un-live and let live as far as humanity’s role in things is concerned - she doesn’t believe vampires should rule over humans, but at the same time, she’d rather not have humans beating down the Court of London’s doors because some idiot let it slip that vampires are real. Past that, she’s prone to jokes and is smitten with you pretty much immediately, admitting in one potential story path that her first meeting with you was “electric” and that she “longed to get closer to you.”
Honestly, I like Marky. So much so that I felt actual distress when I peeked at the code and saw how many awful fates she has waiting for her, depending on how the story goes. One fate, in particular, has her on the run from your new vampiric domination, but she eventually gives up trying to run and instead tearfully faces the sunrise one last time, allowing her body to be unmade in the light of day. Another fate is meeting her end against the main villain, which, depending on whether you have violent descriptions enabled or not, can either be described as her smiling and tossing you an “everything’s gonna be alright” wink as she goes out, or looking at you in cold terror as death consumes her. I may have lost a bit of sleep over those.
Saffron De Lisle (a.k.a. Lucy Ducker) - Get ready for a lot of spoiler tags, Saffron’s kind of a big deal. A self-styled Lady of the Court of London, though if you have a high enough relationship stat with Fergus, you can learn that she was nothing more than a seamstress, and later a prostitute before Fergus made her a vampire, and she began pretending to belong to a higher station sometime during the Napoleonic Wars. Arrogant, seductive and smug, Saffron is the main villain of the story, directly responsible for your death and the consequent theft of the Cross of Aguirre. She was also responsible for sending the three young women to try and finish you off at the start of the story, and is the root cause of several other attempts on your life throughout the plot, up to chapter seven, where you can finally decide whether to side with her or not - a point of criticism, if I may: it’s hard for me to want to join someone’s side when they’ve been trying to kill me over and over, and are more than happy to admit to it if confronted.
Saffron is the kind of woman who knows she’s hot and has absolutely no qualms about flaunting it, and thinks that anybody who doesn’t is a little bitch. She finds entertainment in wantonly killing humans for sport, and will look down her nose on you as a boor if you disagree. She doesn’t so much sneer villainously as she does grin villainously, flashing her pearly whites while insulting you directly to your face, when she’s not trying to kill you or coerce you over to her side, and into her bed.
Saffron has a goal in mind, and that goal is to have vampires dominate humanity and rule under the shadow of an eternal night as a vampire queen, because she’s totally not vain or anything. To do that, she needs a certain item: the Reliquary of Souls, which is comprised of three pieces that, up to now, were safely split apart on opposite ends of the world from each other. One item is the Reliquary itself, buried deep beneath the Tower of London; one is the Porto Bello ring, in the possession of one of the other ROs, foolishly brought to London from Panama by a privateer who didn’t know any better; and the third, the Cross of Aguirre, was stolen off your dead carcass. Turns out that exhibition was a farce Saffron concocted to get the Cross out of New York. When united, the Reliquary of Souls wields unfathomable power, enough to allow a vampire to do pretty much whatever they want, virtually uncontested. An MC with a sufficiently high Human stat can even use it to reverse their vampirism, and Marky’s if you’re feeling generous and she survives to the end of the story. Furthermore, she needs to make sure that the Court of London can’t harass her too much in her efforts to claim total authority, so during chapter seven, she unleashes a coup against Fergus and his supporters in a bid to take over, or if not that, then at the very least wipe out the worst of her opponents.
…Meh. Saffron is pretty ephemeral, as far as her characterization goes. A mustache-twirling villain from minute one, with no redeeming qualities that I’ve been able to discern. She gets jealous if you choose to romance anybody other than her (only if you’ve thrown your lot in with her; she doesn’t even give you a second glance otherwise), exists for little else other than to be a sexy villain, and even when she dies - if you choose to kill her - her epilogue details how her ashes pollute the Thames for a little while after her death and turn the water black, with some smug remark about how if you’re going to die, you should at least make sure it’s as big a spectacle as possible. She was already on the back foot with me, given how little I like villain ROs to begin with, and the fact that her antics are so ham-fisted meant that she never had any chance of leading the pack. Not to mention, her scheme is paper thin - any one small thing that goes wrong sets her so far back, it’s not even funny. She goes from being a cunning chessmaster to looking like a whole-ass clown in the span of a paragraph. Doctor Doofenshmirtz, if Doof’s villainy was played straight rather than as an intentional point of comedy. Hell, I started reading her parts in Doof’s voice after a while.
You can argue her into killing herself, though, or give her such an enormous mind-snap that she comes to her senses just long enough to have an “Oh God, what have I done” moment and commit death^2, so that’s something, I guess. And I imagine folks who are into villain romances will enjoy her well enough. She’s just not my preference.
Alex Hayward - A high society socialite, the owner of Matchlocke Manor, and the unfortunate owner of the Porto Bello ring that Saffron would very much like to get her hands on. Alex, like Marky, is gender-customizable, so obviously I had her set as female. Saffron’s evidently been after Alex for some time now, because depending on how badly you play your cards in your attempts to get close to her and get her ring, she can sniff you out as Saffron’s bitch right away and will be none too pleased about it. On the other hand, if you don’t completely whiff your first impressions, you could receive an invitation to visit her at Matchlock Manor later on, and she’ll be more than happy to have you. Either way, you’re going to Matchlock Manor, because Saffron impresses the mission upon you to steal the Porto Bello ring, and you have no option to back out or say no.
Alex isn’t really big on all the pomp and circumstance of high society, expressing frustration and boredom with all the posturing and politicking that comes with aristocratic life through her sheer disinterest in the gallery where you first meet her, and such statements as, “And please don’t bow. Even as a joke. I’m one of the lucky ones, and that crap is an uncomfortable reminder of my privilege.” She doesn’t aspire to world peace or traveling the globe, but simply wishes for her home to feel less like a museum and more like, well, a home - she wants Matchlock’s halls to be filled with laughter and merriment. Somewhere she can feel happy to spend her life. In spite of the fact that she’s not too fond of her piratical heritage, she has a bit of swashbuckler blood in her, going for a sword if she catches you breaking into her safe and acrobatically hopping across rooftops in order to escape from Saffron’s goon squad when they break into her home, and even cracking a few skulls her own self if it ultimately proves unavoidable. She’s shockingly receptive to the concept of vampires, and can even be convinced to become one if you go that route. She’s furthermore surprisingly willing to part with the ring, even if you go as far as breaking into her home or, worse, disguising yourself as one of the people closest to her. in fact, if you reveal your vampirism to her early on, she’ll just give it to you on the basis of the ring not being worth dying over (which, ironically, it is, given what it’s used for, but she doesn’t know that part).
I ended up romancing Alex, which turned out to be a bit humorous because my character had, up to the point where I locked in the romance, botched every single interaction with her (I tend to bungle my first playthrough attempts rather severely), so the relationship began as a hatemance and slowly leveled out into a proper romance by the end of the story. In a way, that made it feel more organic, because otherwise, a lot of Alex’s interactions can risk feeling a bit… artificial. The fact that you need to get her ring means that the narrative has to make her as pliable to you as possible, and because she’s a major romance option, it’s probably not good to make it impossible to romance her, so she’s unrealistically forgiving about quite a lot of lines being crossed. That said, you can piss Alex off to the point of her breaking up with you, so it’s not like you can lock in the romance and then proceed to be a horrible jerk the whole rest of the time, either.
Doctor Kurt Wilcox - An academic of Empire College in South Kensington by day, and a sworn hunter of FILTHY BLOODSUCKING NECKBITERS by night. Kurt has his sights set on you from the moment you walk out of the morgue, and not with any desire to get to know you better - he wants you dead. Even if you get into contact with him via your old buddy, Zach Lock. Nevermind that your circumstances are what they are, in Kurt’s mind, the second you became a vampire, you automatically became pure evil without any chance of redemption… so you have to work damn hard to get him to come around to the idea that you’re, you know, maybe not pure evil. Unless you choose to lean into the villain angle, in which case, good luck with that. Kurt is, in a word, reluctant to help you at all, even if you specifically reach out to him for help, on account of your vampirism, but if you maintain a healthy degree of Humanity and don’t stray too far into Vampirism, he’s more flexible on that point.
It turns out that Kurt is the latest in a long, long line of Crusaders who swore their lives to defend the Reliquary of Souls from vampiric ambitions, after having previously claimed it from its original owner’s corpse back in the twelfth century. Or that’s their version of the story - turns out, Bohemund of Taranto, the vampire responsible for your transformation, whom you meet near the climax of the plot, simply let the Reliquary slip out of his grasp because he had no good use for it anymore. In the present day, Kurt is the leader of the local unit of vampire hunters in London, and the fact that you’re so close to not one, but two of the pieces of the Reliquary that he has sworn to defend makes you an object of interest, whether you happen to be a vampire or not, so he is grudgingly willing to lay aside his grudge for the sake of making sure the world doesn’t plunge into chaos. Surprisingly, you can get him to act as a liaison between vampires and hunters in order to forge a system of checks and balances that allow both to exist in peace while also keeping the peace. I have no idea how to do that. I only know about it from code-diving. Kurt is also one of the avenues for getting the drop on Bill Boston and killing him early for the achievement. The other option is Zach, who will more than likely die as a consequence, so Kurt is the safer bet.
The game’s advertisement calls Kurt “stoic,” but after reading the story, that’s the wrong word to describe the man - in fact, he’s very expressive, in a very unfriendly manner. “Hostile” would be more accurate. Every conversation with the guy is like pulling teeth, even if you’re trying to get on his good side. Your MC can even get to a point of snapping at him, themselves, over how aggressive he is at all times. He does eventually lighten up, but like I said previously, you have to put in some serious elbow grease to get it to happen.
So, at the end of the day, do I think Vampire’s Kiss is worth it? Well, for a discount Vampire: the Masquerade story… it could have done worse. It wasn’t exactly the deep dive of vampiric politicking that those games are, but I also didn’t expect it to be in the first place. As with many of the HC games, if you choose not to engage in the sex aspect, the romances can feel a bit surface-level, but then, the HC label is supposed to be for saucy romances in the first place, and for only having skimmed the surface of the Alex Hayward romance, I can’t say it was poorly done, not by any stretch. Saffron… is probably not the best attempt at a villain romance, at least not for me, but she was starting from a hobbled position anyhow because I don’t gravitate towards villains in the first place. But for a quick story about vampires, romance, and maybe preventing, or causing, world domination by vampires, VK held my attention as long as it needed to, and the experience is one I’m happy to do over again if I get bored, so that’s a pretty good position to find one’s self in, all told.
