The Blood of Dawnwalker makes one hell of a first impression

The Blood of Dawnwalker welcomes you to a world of distractions. The second that Coen steps beyond the threshold of an old wooden cabin and out into the wilds of Vale Sangora, the advice offered by his father just moments before is soon forgotten: "Go, and don't dawdle." In the small village of Laslea, nestled beneath towering Carpathian Mountains, everybody wants a piece of your time.

Your siblings ask you to waste the day away fishing by a lake. Gathering soldiers push past you, ignoring the pleas of villages to hunt for a thief. A butcher asks you to locate a wayward pig, an acquaintance wants help locating a friend who may have gone missing in a mineshaft. Oh, and don't forget: your father wants you to obtain medicinal herbs for your ailing mother ahead of the coming blood mass. Another character beckons you over from a distant treeline.

Each demand of your time (and plenty more besides) hold equal importance in the questlog. You can pursue all of them to some extent, and in any order. However, there aren't enough hours in the day to complete them all. Time is your most precious commodity – a finite resource that must be spent, that can never be reclaimed. In The Blood of Dawnwalker, stories can resolve because of you, without you, and around you. Characters live because of your actions; die because of inaction. How you spend your time has consequences that always ripple outward, and in ways that are difficult to anticipate.

Fear the Dawn

The Blood of Dawnwalker is the debut video game from Rebel Wolves, a studio founded by former CDPR veterans who helped shape RPG classics like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3. On its surface, The Blood of Dawnwalker draws easy comparisons to Wild Hunt. Each stars a lone hero who ventures out into a medieval open world, battling supernatural threats with drawn swords and inhuman abilities. Look a little closer though, and you'll find that Dawnwalker is a deeply experimental project that is threatening to redefine what it means to role-play.

How you choose to spend the day in Laslea is your business, but just know that every choice made will have some sort of consequence in The Blood of Dawnwalker's narrative sandbox. While you are free to wander the world to your heart's content, almost every meaningful action you undertake costs time. That could be something as simple as leveling Coen up, as incidental as pushing a questline forward, or as consequential as bringing a storyline to a close. The day and night is divided into eight segments which are constantly tracked in the top corner of the screen, with decisions made consuming portions of the allotted time and pushing the worldstate forward.

Rebel Wolves has been fairly forthcoming throughout the development of The Blood of Dawnwalker, showing hours of early gameplay footage to the public over the last 15 months – cycling through the same location from different perspectives in an effort to convey the scale of its sandbox, and the malleability of its stories. The transparency should be lauded, even if the approach hasn't always been successful. It's been difficult to grasp whether a promising concept had any real potential to deliver.

Seeing an abridged version of the opening prologue, which will consume around four hours of your real-world time depending on your approach, has put The Blood of Dawnwalker into a new light. The opening section of this RPG is self-contained; you have a full in-game day to explore the village, finding different things to do until sundown. Once day transitions to night, the valley's citizens are summoned to submit a measure of blood as taxation to an ancient race of vampires. The vrakhiri exchange longer-lasting life for this act of subservience, although (naturally) not everybody is onboard.

What I find so interesting about The Blood of Dawnwalker running on an internal clock is that it's difficult to truly anticipate how the status of quests may shift around you. Critically, there are no failstates in the game – stories simply resolve, and the world continues on. That NPC who tumbled into a mineshaft? It'll cost two segments of time to venture in after him, but if you leave it too long they may already be beyond saving. Perhaps you delve straight into the depths, but what then of the pig that is being tracked by roving packs of wild wolves? Get so distracted that you forget to pick up those herbs for your mother? Well, I wouldn't want to spoil the consequence of that action.

Narrative Sandbox

Within the confines of the prologue area, it's easier to grasp how Rebel Wolves is building its narrative sandbox. The Blood of Dawnwalker appears to have an exceptionally compelling game loop running beneath its lush Unreal Engine 5-powered exterior.

What's a little staggering is how this loop of choice and consequence will present itself once you're freed of the constraints of Laslea. With the prologue complete, The Blood of Dawnwalker will thrust you out into the wider open-world, a sprawling region known as Vale Sangora. Rebel Wolves tried to express the lengths it has gone to breathe authenticity into its 14th century medieval setting and, honestly, it all sounds a little dizzying. What is clear to me is that the prospect of planning hours carefully, and deciding where to invest your time, being mindful of the way the world may react to whatever priorities you set, could have the power to set a new benchmark for the RPG genre.

A smart decision by Rebel Wolves sees almost every single quest presented as an optional engagement. Even the main overarching story – having just 30 days and 30 nights to save your family, kidnapped by vrakhiri lord Brencis – can be ignored. Fail to save your kin, the world continues on in the aftermath of that decision. Or you could choose to immediately storm the castle gates where they are being held once you're let loose in Vale Sangora, a nice nod to one of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's neatest narrative frames.

Not that you'll have much luck facing Brencis or the other vampire lords who rule over different regions of the map in the earliest hours of this adventure. If there's any one area that has come on leaps and bounds since The Blood of Dawnwalker was last shown to the public, it's combat. In previous demos I always thought Coen's movement looked a little stiff when engaged in swordplay by day, his attacks a little flaccid when facing off against foes with claws and strikes by night. Rebel Wolves is in the process of applying final polish to the game ahead of its release on September 3, 2026, and there's been a massive improvement to visual fidelity, animation, artificial intelligence of enemies, and general fluidity.

When analyzing The Blood of Dawnwalker and the massive ambitions of its 150 strong development team at Rebel Wolves, the focus is invariably put on the ambition of its narrative sandbox. There is another element worth exploring, that of its unique character framing: Coen exists between two worlds, that of a human and a vrakhiri – the titular dawnwalker. After Brencis plunges a fang into Coen's heart (this is how folks are turned into vampires in the lore, rather than through traditional bites), he gains some of the power of the vrakhiri but is saved from full transformation due to silver poisoning after a childhood spent excavating local mines.

This means that Coen is able to wield unnatural strength at night, and use abilities such as Shadow Step to navigate the world itself in interesting ways, while being a little exposed during the day, utilizing powers of deduction and swordplay to survive in the waking hours. That day/night cycle brings another layer of complexity to this RPG, so too does combat systems built around careful movement – a tidy blend of the cinematic edge afforded through the Batman: Arkham series and the more precise strike placements found in titles like For Honor and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. A skill tree with three main branches (each complete with its own passive and active abilities) will allow you to further specialize between day and night proficiencies, giving even more scope to the sort of character you want to build.

All told, The Blood of Dawnwalker is on track to be one of the most ambitious RPGs of the generation. The creative concept that sits at its heart is compelling, powered by a desire at Rebel Wolves to build a video game which brings the improvisational carnage of pen-and-paper RPGs to a more virtual setting. We'll know soon enough whether Dawnwalker can land as expected, and whether the decision to build a quest system around detours and delays, fragile connections and missed opportunities, is compelling enough to power an entire adventure.