The expansion takes you back to the Big Apple, but this time you’re playing as a newly-inaugurated member of the Lasombra Clan, one Julia Sowinski. It’s a visual novel, meaning the story is told purely through text and the captivating backdrops each character scene provides. Polish developer Draw Distance’s Shadows of New York is billed a “stand-alone expansion” to their Coteries of New York, which was released last year. Whilst the writing is solid, demonstrating a strong understanding of the culture wars currently being fought across the digital landscape and gratifyingly skewing towards the inclusive and progressive, it’s the narrative itself that struggles to assert itself. Sadly, that’s all just texture for the most part. Somehow Shadows of New York avoids these pitfalls, managing to feel at one with both the lore of the vast world it takes place in and our own fraught, ruptured reality. It runs the risk of trying to capture those defining moments, those shocking turning-points in the historical narrative unfolding in real-time, and rendering them shallow, even cringe-inducing, as some level of distance is always necessary to properly understand it. That being said, it’s a difficult prospect writing a story of ‘now’, and one I’ve always been inclined to stay clear of. The boldness of its narrative impressed and enthralled me, and I want more of it in my games in these oh-so-urgent times of ours.
Shadows of New York is a game about politics and the way politics is infused into every facet of our beings.
It is a tale of a debauched, grotesquely wealthy elite presiding over a city of broken, desperate people, haunted by an impending apocalypse-climate-induced, technological, viral, pick your horror-precious few seem inclined to curtail, let alone prevent.Īnd this apocalypse cares not a whit for whether you’re human or vampire after all, Kindred were once human themselves, and its ruling body, the Camarilla-so intent on maintaining the status quo at all costs-a potent metaphor for a global system that refuses to change, adapt, or evolve. Shadows of New York artfully depicts our 2020 hell-scape, holds it up as a mirror and doesn’t so much ask whether or not we’re fucked as yell it in our faces. Yet it is not a tale familiar out of triteness, but rather in its bleak and despairing contemporaneity. V ampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York weaves a familiar tale.
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