The Blood of the Dawnwalker puts player choice at the forefront, and while players have the freedom to make all the wrong choices, they won’t be able to “fail” the game.
We learned a lot about this new open-world RPG from Rebel Wolves during our recent hands-on session. Among these was the fact that the game has a promising story with plenty of choices that matter. Even though we only experienced the opening hours of the game, we already got to see how the right (or wrong) dialogue option can affect how the story plays out.
For instance, most of the game’s characters can die if you make the wrong decision at the wrong time. All of these will be reflected in the game’s epilogue.
Following our hands-on, we got to attend a Q&A with the game’s Narrative Director and Main Writer, Jakub Szamalek. During the session, he explained the game’s structure and how the consequences of players’ actions will affect the ending.
Szamalek shared:
“Our game is structured whereby you have a prologue area, which then opens up and allows you to explore a big open world where there are a lot of quests, each of which contains choices, and those present different consequences.
Then, ultimately, you return to your village for an epilogue sequence. What happens in that epilogue varies a lot. Some characters might be present; others will be dead. Some might still like you; others might despise you. It all depends on the choices you made throughout the whole game.
So, there are many, many, many different ways for the game to end.”
Based on Szamalek’s explanation, The Blood of the Dawnwalker probably won’t have a simple, color-coded ending, encouraging players to think deeply about the choices that they make in-game.
I learned this the hard way during my hands-on time. In the game, the protagonist Coen becomes a vampire early on, and if you talk to NPCs while having below 50% health, Coen will succumb to his vampiric thirst and proceed to drink the NPC’s blood. At one point, I became careless, and I killed a character in this way.
When this happened, a question popped into my mind. What would happen if you make the wrong move in all the scenarios like what I experienced? Can you fail The Blood of the Dawnwalker before reaching the epilogue?
I asked Szamalek this, and it turns out you can’t. He explained:
“You can get an ending that you’ll feel bad about, that’s for sure. Yes, but I don’t think you can fail. You can quit without finishing it, but there’s no real fail state.
To give you an example, even if you drink all the NPCs, which you can do, there are very few people in the game who will always survive; there are maybe five of them. So even if you drink everyone and you’re a total monster, the game will let you. It’s a pretty harrowing ending, but you can do that.”
So it’s confirmed that the developers over at Rebel Wolves made it so that you will get to the epilogue no matter how badly you screw up the quests. While I’ll probably strive to not get this bad of an ending, this does make for promising replayability. This aligns with the fact that Rebel Wolves is developing this game to be great for multiple playthroughs.
The Blood of Dawnwalker will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on September 3, 2026.
For more on the game, read:
The Blood of the Dawnwalker Hands-on | A Gothic Open-World RPG with a Truly Promising Story