I’ve been vaguely looking forward to grotty dark fantasy RPG The Blood Of Dawnwalker, despite its genAI flirtations. To recap, it casts you as a medieval vampire fledgling whose family has been abducted by another, boss vampire. You’ve got 30 days and nights to save your loved ones while deciding just how much you’re going to succumb to the gore-guzzling curse.
Sounds stressful, but the game’s modelling of time is quite forgiving: each day is broken into chrono-locked segments, with time only passing when you make certain choices. Also, you can “bend” time by offering murdered people’s teeth to the Tooth Fairy.
The fairies in question are called Sanzhana. They look like chubby half-human moths, with blue skin and whispering wings. Our friends at Ian Games have a video in which we see one in action, harvesting enamel from cadavers dumped in a ring of red mushrooms. They routinely barter with bandits and other deplorables for pearly and not-so-pearly whites. You can get into the incisor trade yourself, if you really must. The Sanzhana don’t pay for teeth in coins, mind: they’re able to mess with the clock in unspecified ways.
“They allow you to play with the time limit,” creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz explained to IGN, “because there are a lot of myths around pixies where they get to do some time-bending stuff. And for us, since our game is so heavily revolving around the time system, this was something cool to play around with.
“I think it’s very cool when you do systemic stuff to have exceptions from it and some ways that impact it in ways you didn’t anticipate,” he went on. “It creates this feeling that something unexpected might happen at every turn and there are still secrets to be found.”
I have so many questions. Firstly, do particular varieties of teeth bestow particular flavours of time-bending? For example, what can I get for a vampire’s fang, versus the claggy bicuspids of some poor turnip farmer I met on the way to market?
Secondly, can I hand over my own teeth, and can I buy those teeth back with my surplus hours if I discover a quest shortcut? Thirdly, can I kill literally everybody in The Blood of Dawnwalker and lob their choppers into a mushroom circle, as when stacking corpses in just the one closet in Hitman? How many sets of teeth are there, exactly, in The Blood of Dawnwalker, and how many days, months or years does that equal? Are there sharks in The Blood of Dawnwalker, by the way? And if so, can I endlessly farm shark teeth to prevent time from advancing at all?
Be warned, Tomaszkiewicz: I am now dangerously invested in the concept of a dental temporal economy. If this turns out to be some kind of glorified checkpointing feature I will leave all of my shabbiest molars under your pillow. The Blood of Dawnwalker launches in September.
