2025. New York. Watched The Game Awards, saw Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won everything; should have been under wool blankets in bed, but I had too much nervous energy. The city is impressive this time of year, sparkles on the snow keep me awake. (Mem. Replace blinds with thick curtains.) They give me strange dreams, something about a bloodsucking anime girl in a Bandai Namco game…
I'd write this sort of note to myself if I were reporting as Jonathan Harker, Bram Stoker's confident Victorian solicitor – but, you know, I might as well be. Me and Jonathan have both been recently afflicted with Dracula, and I am now certain 2025 is the year of the vampire.
Quietly, as required by their nighttime nature, the pale demons have dominated new and upcoming video games. While indie and AAA phenomenons like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and a barrage of others showed their faces to the sun at award shows and Reddit threads, games about vampires have been slumped in the shadows.
Say it, out loud
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Cabernet, the scholarly vampire RPG, has unfortunately been neglected – despite the fact that its 117 recent Steam reviews, as of writing, are Overwhelmingly Positive. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 had potential to be a more major hit, since fans of the 2004 original had suffered through several lifetimes waiting for the project to survive dev hell. But The Chinese Room didn't make it greasy enough.
"I feel it in the wet paper bag punch, dash, punch, dash monotony of each combat encounter," senior writer Jasmine Gould-Wilson says of the game's missed potential in our Bloodlines 2 review, "cringe at it whenever Fabien spouts another corny detective-ism that sounds like a film student's first go at a noir script."
Being a loser isn't inherently antithetical to being a vampire – really, the opposite is true. See Dracula, Count Orlok, Edward Cullen, all antisocial and desperate for a girl who blushes rose. They cling to Mina, to Ellen, to Bella like mud on their coffins. They plunge their teeth into her hot flesh, and they drain the girl of humanity.
But Bloodlines 2 misinterprets the sex appeal of the situation; vampires can be uncool, but they should also be irresistibly powerful.
I think this truth is what continuously draws the video game industry to the monsters: in another light, perhaps under the pearl of the moon, video games look a lot like vampires themselves. They allow you, whoever you are, to unload the boring humanity you were born with and become something that can't die. They also often let you adopt big muscles, as an added bonus.
Bloodbath
Vampires can be uncool, but they should also be irresistibly powerful.
2025, leading into 2026, is a particularly good time for this ritual rebirth, so I'm hoping vampire games start collecting loyal audiences and better embracing their macabre subject matter. I want to savor the fact that games are getting consistently paranormal for the first time since the zombie craze of the 2010s.
Back then, cultural optimism made brainless rotting more appealing. Like, sure, that sounds fun – make me a zombie, as long as I get to decay wearing American Apparel pants.
But now, with AI, layoffs, blatant censorship terrorizing us both in and out of the industry, the vampire story offers more desperate relief. The seductor appears somewhere over your bed – eyes white, teeth stained, and asks you brazenly to expose your breast.
I think of Anne Rice's description of the vampire Lestat, in her 1976 book Interview with the Vampire, "starkly white, so that in the night he was almost luminous." With this inhumanity, vampires transport you from everything mundane and bad. Have you not felt the same pull from your PC?
Completely drained
In another light, perhaps under the pearl of the moon, video games look a lot like vampires themselves.
Our daily disappointments show no signs of stopping. They only collect like wine stains – more AI, exploitation, injustice is in the news every day.
So let the vampire games persist. 14th-century sandbox The Blood of Dawnwalker is set to launch in 2026, as is FromSoftware's brooding The Duskbloods for Nintendo Switch 2. Deckbuilder Vampire Crawlers from Vampire Survivors developer Poncle will also be out in 2026, and Bandai Namco is confirmed to unleash Code Vein 2's goth apocalypse on January 29.
I admit, I'm a vampire sympathiser. (But if I have weird feelings about Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre, that's on Klaus Kinski, not me).
It's just that the myth of the vampire has endured centuries all around the world. Old stories teach you the leeches have gorged themselves in Greece, Romania, and Germany – they've dodged stakes, garlic, and silver crosses around castles forever. They've overpowered rats and men, so they must have found lust in unending pain. I'd like to see them transform us next.
Keep reflecting on the year with our picks for GamesRadar+ GOTY: the 25 best games of 2025.
