The Blood of Dawnwalker Review: Witcher 3 veterans prove a focused RPG beats a bloated one

While this may be the first game to open with the Rebel Wolves logo, it is far from the first game from the people behind the new studio.

Even if you didn’t know that Rebel Wolves is made up of scores of former CD Projekt Red developers – including its director, who previously helmed The Witcher 3 – you’d feel it.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is an RPG about choice, corruption, and the player’s power fantasy. By pitching an RPG that’s full of intrigue and intricate storytelling, but setting it in a small (by today’s standards) open world, it shines as an example of the genre that doesn’t go big for the sake of it. This is the story of a tiny slice of Europe dealing with an existential threat, and it’s an incredibly strong ‘debut’ from the team.

The player controls Coen, who is turned into a Dawnwalker early in the game. Part-human, part-vampire, Dawnwalkers can live freely in the day, unlike the true vampires of this realm. Coen pursues his family, who are captured by a coterie of vampiric villains led by the evil Brencis.

Coen must dispatch Brencis’ generals and then the big bad himself before 30 in-game days elapse, lest Brencis reign as the leader of this land forever. What Coen fits into those 30 days is up to the player.

In The Blood of Dawnwalker, most tasks will come with a time cost. It may take four in-game hours to wait for a companion to arrive, or a potion may take an entire day to brew. The Blood of Dawnwalker sets time up as an expendable tool, something that the player should worry about when it comes to what they’re going to spend their month doing.

In reality, it’s far from strict. Aside from a few time-based quests, which heavily warn the player of their imminent expiration, the ticking clock element of The Blood of Dawnwalker didn’t massively impact my experience.

Perhaps if more missions featured more punishing time penalties, then that pressure would be more keenly felt, but in practice, when I finished the game and had done virtually everything I was interested in doing (which was most of it), I still had around ten days left before the coronation.

The Blood of Dawnwalker splits its combat between traditional sword-fighting fare and melee attacks with Coen’s newly sharpened claws. When using a weapon, a directional parry and block system adds a layer of complexity to what could be fairly standard RPG combat. The omniblock system feels like a cousin of the Chivalry series’ attempt to accurately recreate sword-vs-sword battles.

It’s never a hard game, but if you don’t master the parrying element of combat, it’s going to be a long slog. I felt rewarded for becoming better at combat, as Coen was slaying enemies in short order, chaining parries together.

“By pitching an RPG that’s full of intrigue and intricate storytelling, but setting it in a small (by today’s standards) open world, it shines as an example of the genre that doesn’t go big for the sake of it.”

But, in many cases, you need not resort to swinging the sword around, as The Blood of Dawnwalker’s conversation system also shines. It’s a fairly traditional multi-choice dialogue system, but the writing is strong, and the decisions can have massive implications for gameplay paths for certain missions. These options are rarely telegraphed, and I’m keen to compare my experience with others who’ve played the same sections.

The bonus ball is Coen’s occasional inability to keep his teeth to himself. When Coen is in vampire mode, occasionally a “feed the hunger” option will appear in the dialogue tree. However, if the player doesn’t select another option quickly enough, feed the hunger will be picked automatically, resulting in multiple moments where I managed to kill important NPCs, or people who’d just helped me, purely because I hadn’t kept track of my health or corruption meter.

Visually, The Blood of Dawnwalker renders an impressive chunk of European mountainside, and facial animations are emotive and relatable. There’s a cohesion to the world that makes it feel realistic, but the game is just as willing to deviate into the fantastical when it’s least expected.

Vale Sangora isn’t the size of the entire universe like some RPG settings, and it’s a better game for it. More areas become memorable because you actually spend a lot of time going back and forth to them. You get to become a citizen of this world, and soon you rarely need the minimap.

This also supports a far more interconnected world, as virtually every quest offers some kind of exposition of further detail on your main quest. Side quests don’t feel like random activities that are totally divorced from Coen’s main quest; every character you speak to will shade the overall picture of the story, making it worth doing the majority of them.

One of the biggest compliments I can give The Blood of Dawnwalker is that it never felt like the game was wasting my time. From the smallest chest to the game’s largest quests, there is virtually no filler. In a 2026 RPG, that feels extremely rare.

Sadly, on the performance side, it’s currently a less positive experience. A choppy frame rate and more than a shrug-offable number of bugs marred my playthrough of Dawnwalker. The game is liberal with auto and manual saves, so there weren’t any total disasters, but from what I played, the launch build is coming in slightly hot.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is an excellent RPG from a team that knows how to make excellent RPGs. Performance issues and some mechanics that aren’t as fleshed out as they could be are unfortunate, but feel destined to be resolved in a sequel.