YMMV / Vampyr (2018)

• Accidental Innuendo: A few with regards to Swansea — though, taking into account his pastimes, some of these may appear not-so-accidental.
  Lord Redgrave: As long as [you, Jonathan] reveal nothing of the club's inner workings, why should I forbid you to engage in "conversation" with the good Dr. Swansea?
  Thelma: [The Guard of Priwen] wanted Dr. Swansea to confess his guilt and admit to relations with blood drinkers.
• Adorkable:
  • Played for Laughs with Jonathan Reid. Most of the time, he avoids this trope due to being a cool and collected gentleman, except for that one time when he gets asked about vampires' sex life since that clearly never crossed his mind before.
  Louise: Well, immortality. Not a common wedding gift, is it! I think [her vampire abductor] just wanted to have his way with me... (beat) Can vampires even fuck, doctor?
  Jonathan: ...What? Well... I... Erm. I really can't... answer that. Well, since vampires are creatures of blood. Huh, physically speaking I suppose, an erection is possible. But, I... (trails off into an awkward silence)
  Louise: (stifles laughter) Don't be embarrassed, Dr. Reid. I was just asking.
  • Dr. Swansea. The thought of going to an exhibition with Jonathan makes him almost giddy with excitement.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Dr. Edgar Swansea is hit with a brick that is this trope. He insists his intentions were good but was he telling the truth, what with his overenthusiastic reaction to Jonathan agreeing to turn him? Is he a victim of circumstance like he paints himself to be? Or is he hiding his self-centered desires behind a veil of compassion and reputation? Is he genuinely Obliviously Evil or is he just a Never My Fault wretch who's getting what he deserved? Or is he a Good Samaritan with a questionable code of conduct? And if he is turned into a vampire, will he – when all is said and done – feel sorry for what he did or will he give into the blood temptation?
  • Dr. Reid himself is this by nature as he's naturally inclined to be a hero but there are hints this may have been a cover for a darker nature. During a flashback, he is shown killing enemy soldiers in combat despite being a medic, and he is accused of being a Glory Hound and a Doctor Jerk. How much of the Horror Hunger is alien to him and how much is he naturally suited to being a vampire?
  • Is Lady Ashbury a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire or a Retired Monster? There're hints at both — like the fact she murders the dying to feed her hunger. Her distaste for the Ascalon Club may be because they're prejudiced pigs but also because she's excluded from the halls of power by their attitudes.
  • Are the Guard of Priwen a bunch of The Fundamentalist Knight Templar types or are they simply The Extremist Was Right and a Necessarily Evil since London is overrun with vampires.
  • Similarly, is Father Whitaker just an Ax-Crazy Hiding Behind Religion, or does the fact he predicts the awakening of the Red Queen mean that he's actually another character in on The Masquerade? In that case, is his speech about preventing the end of the world just Properly Paranoid?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Reid's trendy modern undercut is actually appropriate for someone coming off the front in 1918. The 'hipster' beard is also more or less era-appropriate.
  • Charlotte Ashbury mentions that some folks are sarcastically talking about building a wall around the West End to corral the voices of the Suffrage Movement. She then says if they ever did that she would blow it up. This seems like a pithy quip meant to show that the Suffrage Movement won't be silenced, but in reality, the first wave of feminism (especially in Britain) did commit several acts of terrorism, such as breaking windows and firebombing mailboxes.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: An odd example of this as a lot of people believed Vampyr would be a Cult Classic since Remember Me had turned out so poorly. It was also being unfairly compared to Life Is Strange, DONTNOD's signature game, and even Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, the other famous vampire RPG. Instead, the game was a huge hit in Europe with best selling status in the UK, Germany, and France, and reached the 1 million units sold by April 2019. Safe to say, it massively increased the publisher's revenue as well.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Players expecting a tough final boss battle with The Red Queen's avatar may find themselves disappointed due to the fact that she is a much easier opponent than the three bosses that precede her. Unlike the two Ichor bosses, the Avatar does not deal poison damage and therefore cannot kill the player in one good hit. She also has no ability to release toxic clouds when damaged and thus can be attacked in quick succession more easily. She summons minions in during the fight, but her minions disappear after a short while, unlike the permanent Skals that Doris can summon. Unlike McCullum's fight, her arena has no special gimmick that hinders the player movement and ability to attack. Her ranged attacks are so easy to dodge that you can avoid them simply by walking, and they don't even do that much damage compared to McCullum's face-melting barrage of bolts. To top it all off, The Avatar needs at least 3 to 4 hits at a rather manageable pace to kill Jonathan, which is a huge letdown after the last three bosses can pretty much insta-kill Jonathan with one hit.
• Awesome Music: The entire score by Olivier Deriviere masterfully encaptures the game's haunting, early 20th Century aesthetic. In particular, The Thirst, the soundtrack that accompanies Jonathan feeding on mesmerized civilians, and White Chapel District music wouldn't be out of place in a survival horror game.
• Base-Breaking Character: Charlotte Ashbury, the adoptive feminist daughter of Elizabeth. Is she an endearing "strong independent woman" like her mother describes her, or just a preachy Bratty Half-Pint whose speech about "women dying in war too" is insensitive? Some may also Take a Third Option and argue that in spite of these flaws, she's still likeable.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: There's a boss lurking in the West End sewers by the name of Leon Augustin, a Vulkod. You will have to fight him to progress the story and there's nothing in the game that foreshadows him. He just pops up, you kill him, and move on. He's never brought up again.
• Cargo Ship: Dr. Swansea and his skull due to him being positively captivated by it during his unmissable cutscenes.
• Catharsis Factor: While embracing can be considered morally questionable many time, one exception is Aloysius Dawson. In addition to being a ruthless rich weapon manufacturer with no regards for poor people, his sheer entitlement and lack of gratitude when expecting you to grant him immortality is so insufferable that it feels very satisfying to watch the terror on his face when he realizes he will die for good.
• Complete Monster: The Red Queen, once worshiped as the Morrigan by the Celts, is a horrific entity hellbent on making humanity suffer and die. In various intervals, she awakens to bring down destruction and death by using a woman as a willing, despairing host to punish the world, forcing her son Myrddin to sire a noble soul so they could stop her. In Edwardian London, the Red Queen calls down a horrific plague, killing countless innocents and turning others into blood-drinking, flesh-eating monsters with intention of forcing humans to suffer worse in indescribable agony once she awakens. Even upon defeat, she promises to return again and bring more suffering on Earth, being only amused at Myrddin's attempts to stop her.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Blinker Skals and Ill-Formed Skals can not only teleport and reappear behind Jonathan, but also leave behind a cloud of acid that causes continuous damage if he is caught in it. They are also very hard to stun and some explode upon death, leaving a puddle of the aforementioned acid.
  • Rogue Ekons are vampires just like Jonathan and come in two equally hair-pulling flavors. The ones in black are sorcerers who like to pester you from a distance with powerful Blood Spear attacks before closing in with hard-hitting melee, and on top of all that, they have the ability to drain stamina preventing you from attacking or dodging. The white-clad ones are strictly melee, and easy to parry to be fair, but they have a habit of spamming the blood barrier over and over and over again, preventing you from dealing much damage outside of bites, which turns the battle into a frustrating marathon. Both are extremely fast and agile. Fortunately, they are only encountered late in the game and found only in the West End and Southwark districts of London. Unfortunately, if you pissed off the Ascalon Club by refusing to turn Dawson into a vampire, be ready to be harassed by them anywhere you go.
• Designated Hero: This is one way to look at the Guard of Priwen and, in particular, McCullum. Throughout the story, the Guard commits a lot of morally questionable or downright villainous deeds: they break into Dorothy's dispensary and shoot all the patients on sight, they mug an innocent trade unionist, they can potentially butcher a human woman who only believes she's a vampire. A few of these transgressions are called out, but no one in the Guard pays any penance. This becomes egregious late-game where Jonathan has to rescue Edgar. To even get to him, Jonathan is forced to read McCullum's findings. This results in him, without rhyme or reason, accepting McCullum's version of events instantly and implicitly. Recognizing this, Swansea's subsequent pillar choice falls flat as it devolves into Jonathan interrogating him by using his mortal enemy's unequivocally 'correct' views he chose to take for granted five minutes ago.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Rufus mentions that he struggles with doing jobs, as he tends to forget why he's doing things while doing them. Him surviving a bombing incident may caused this to him in some way, but no hard explanation on his condition is provided by the game itself.
  • It's implied that Emelyne may have developed schizophrenia following her husband's self-exile and Mary losing her baby to the flu. Jonathan has described her as "sickly" too. However, it's also possible she had her brain fried by Mary's Mesmerism.
  • It's obvious to Jonathan himself after questioning Carloyn on her abuse of her daughter that she is very mentally sick to the point that she honestly does not believe that she is doing anything wrong, even while Jonathan uses his Compelling Voice to force her to answer his questioning. However, nothing can be done to have her undergo an actual diagnosis and considering Vampyr is set during 1918, it's doubtful that what exists of psychotherapy right now would be able to help her anyway, so whatever mental disorder she would actually have is only up to the players.
• Die for Our Ship: General fandom consensus says that Elisabeth and Edgar are the most prominent characters to be killed off so the Jonathan and Geoffrey ship could take place.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Geoffrey McCullum's crimes are often mitigated by the fandom because of his dashing looks and general involvement in the story.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: A commonly held opinion about the game is the atmosphere, characters, and world-building is spectacular. Jonathan Reid may be a bit too bland (at least as Friendly Neighborhood Vampires go) but the game revives a lot of classic Gothic archetypes for the game. Unfortunately, the combat is clunky and repetitive with most of the characters wasted as potential food sources for Jonathan. The developers seemed to have agreed as sometime after release they added a "Story Mode."
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Nurse Dorothy Crane is well-loved by the fanbase due to her commitment and devotion for Whitechapel with several players opting to not kill her and being dejected to find that wiping her memory leads to her becoming a Skal, with many regretting this option and choosing to restart the game all over to pick the other alternative where she lives. It helps that choosing to have her resign from her job so she can work full-time in her dispensary leads to her becoming a helpful merchant.
  • Nurse Pippa and Milton stand out due to being an interracial couple who balance sympathetic and unsympathetic traits: They're tough and well-intentioned, but their growing cynicism has driven them to prey on patients by extorting them.
  • Seeing as he has mere fifteen or so minutes of screen-time, this trope also applies to Geoffrey McCullum for being a badass, self-righteous extremist that can potentially be turned into a vampire himself for a taste of his own medicine.
• Epileptic Trees: Probably the best known and widely accepted fan theory out there assumes that McCullum is going to become a vampire regardless of Jonathan’s choices; he did ingest King Arthur’s blood right before his boss fight, and King Arthur was one of Myrddin’s Champions. The fact that McCullum’s features develop a bloodless pallor even if Jonathan explicitly spares him further feeds this hypothesis.
• Evil Is Cool: Jonathan himself if he's played this way, backed up by the fact he's got not an ounce of shame in him following his jump off the slippery slope.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Thanks to civilians having their distinctive backstories and character traits, there is an untapped fanfic fodder exploring their lives, what would happen if they became vampires themselves, etc.
  • Lady Ashbury's adventures prior the start of the series is also an popular fanfic subject, specially how she served as inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula.
  • The revelation that King Arthur was a vampire too just like Jonathan and the list may include Francis Drake, Guy Fawkes and William Shakespeare adds even more fuel as to what historical figure also were an vampire champion raised to defend Britain against the Red Queen.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Barbed Cudgel. It is the only two-handed weapon with Parry as a special ability that also adds regular stun points to each successful hit. With it, it becomes laughably easy to knock foes to the ground and use your Bite on them. Biting also gives Jonathan's stamina bar the required i-frames to fully recover which equals to more melee swings taken. Rise and repeat to effectively stunlock all your enemies. Moreover, it is found early game in the sewers where you fight the Sewer Beast. The drawback is that it's completely useless against enemies that do not have a stamina bar i.e. the Red Queen.
  • On the other hand, if you prefer the one-handed weapon approach, there's the Surgical Knife type of off-hand daggers that draw blood on each hit. You can find one as early as the old morgue and is the only weapon you can upgrade to “epic” (purple) and “legendary” (orange) levels as early as Whitechapel. Buy the upgrade parts from Barrett in Whitechapel (who sells them regardless of Health Status) and use them to give the knife even more blood absorption. By the end, you'll be able to restore the entirety of your blood bar in a few seconds, and unlike the Cudgel mentioned above, it's still very helpful against the Red Queen. The one drawback to this is that you'll need a lot of coins to fully upgrade the knife — you'll need nine of the tiny good handle parts and Barrett sells only two per night and each one is 80-100 shillings.
    • Bouncing off the Surgical Knife bit, it’s also quite possible to spec into the Claws skill — which reduces the cooldown between its uses to .5 seconds, meaning Jonathan can spam it ad infinitum until his Blood bar is empty. But once it’s empty, it can be readily replenished with the Surgical Knife. Paired with the pre-casted Blood Barrier, in light of the fact only a few of the late-game foes are resistant to Melee, and that Claws do not consume Stamina at all, it becomes comically easy to tear through hordes of enemies without ever resorting to your main-hand weapon. The Claws’ one inconvenience is that its final .5 second cooldown upgrade requires Jonathan to be level 26, so it’s impossible for him to have Claws as his only skill.
  • Or, provided you're willing to do so, Embracing Rakesh gives you a level five main-hand weapon that can be upgraded to have that effect. While it doesn't absorb as much blood, it still deals a lot of damage and can absorb up to 10 points of blood per hit. The only downside is that you don't get it as early, as Rakesh requires level four to mesmerize.
  • The Medical Hacksaw is possibly the fastest melee weapon in the game but does no less damage than any other one-handed weapon. You get it early in the game and might use it for the entire game if you don't find one of the scant few main weapons better than it.
  • The Priwen stake is an offhand weapon that with only one or two upgrades can knock most weaker enemies on their backs with one hit, allowing you to combat bite as often as possible. Pair this up with the ability chain that lets you increase your bite damage by over 1000% and you can juggernaut your way through this game's combat system with nothing more than your teeth.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game did modestly well in the United States but received only limited buzz and some Tough Act to Follow accusations regarding Life Is Strange. By contrast, it was a huge success in Europe and topped the UK, Germany, and France's game charts.
• Good Bad Bugs: You can get enemies to ignore you by leaving their aggro zone. Since the distance they stop attacking you and the distance they begin to fight you is different, you can pull a hit and run, striking at their backs as they walk back to the distance where they recognize you hitting them.
• Ho Yay:
  • Dr. Swansea admires Jonathan a lot. And McCullum does make a point of staring deep into Jonathan's eyes. Both of these men can be turned, which is a process that involves a certain amount of bodily contact and fluid exchange.
  • Jonathan making the decision to save Sean by giving him his Ekon blood gets pretty ... intense, what with Jonathan demanding Sean get on his knees and suck on his bleeding wrist. The dialogue leading up to it also implies Sean himself may see it in a somewhat sexual, or at least uncomfortably intimate, light.
• Low-Level Run: The "Not Even Once" achievement usually causes this, since embracing citizens is the main way to gain XP.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • You're a stupid bastard, but you're my friend, X. ^Explanation Jonathan's reaction to Clarence being thick-skulled i.e. Clarence not wanting to believe that his wife is poisoning him.
  • Can vampires even fuck, doctor? ^Explanation Louise Teasdale asks this at one point which leaves Jonathan sputtering.
  • A perfect fit. ^Explanation How Dr. Swansea had managed to procure clothes for Jonathan that fit him perfectly despite Edgar not knowing Jonathan's measurements.
  • IDIOT SANDWICH. ^Explanation The way Jonathan holds Edgar's face after finding him in the theater has led to this infamous skit by Hell's Cafeteria's Gordon Ramsey.
  • King Arthur's flasks of whiskey. ^Explanation During his boss fight, Geoffrey McCullum will occasionally drink from his flasks with King Arthur's blood. Thing is, he discards the flask every time, so he must have infinite numbers of them beneath his coat. Plus, he holds them as he's drinking alcohol and not blood.
  • I had the tea served. ^Explanation Elisabeth's 'tea' scene for when she and Jonathan discuss the Ascalon Club is as silly as it is awesome – considering they're both vampires who cannot stomach food.
  • Neck-sniffing. ^Explanation For a reason that's unsurprising, Turning Edgar will make him smell Thomas Elwood's neck. That, coupled with Edgar refusing to talk about anything related to the Embraces he's done, has made this a meme.
  • SCHLORP. ^Explanation Again for Edgar, this being the informal 'name' for the sound he makes when drinking Jonathan's blood.
  • Are you/is he/is she my Maker? ^Explanation Jonathan keeps about who could’ve sired him at varying intervals which has led to its meme-status.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Aloysius Dawson is every bit the massive jackass as Lady Ashbury describes him, but he is not over the MEH yet. If he is turned into a vampire though, he intends to feed on his employees, kills all his other family members so he can keep their inheritance, goes on a power trip planning to have England conquer the rest of Europe and then place an immortal monarch ruling over the rest of the world. To make matters worse, he becomes a Karma Houdini and there is nothing you can do to stop him. Even worse than that is that this is all your fault, and could have been avoided by doing a bit of detective work or even simply killing him instead of purposefully empowering him, knowing he didn’t have good intentions.
  • Dr. Swansea is revealed to have crossed it when he began the Skal epidemic by injecting Harriet Jones with Lady Ashbury's blood. Though he argues it was an extremely careless 'accident' on his part, he most definitely crossed the moral event horizon in Jonathan's point-of-view since from that point on, the only things left to do are to kill him, leave him to die of his injuries or punish him with vampirism (it doesn't quite work).
  • While many of the people Jonathan can feed on are Asshole Victim gang members, murderers, or worse, you can also feed on complete innocents. Camellia, Sabrina Cavendish, Stella Fishburn, and even the daughter of your best friend Charlotte Ashbury. The latter is considered particularly horrifying by some players.
• Narm: The opening narrator's Purple Prose monologue has been subject to some mockery due to his hamminess and this particular jewel:

  What is glass, but tortured sand?

• Narm Charm: That being said, his delivery makes it sound just as awesome as it does ridiculous.
• Player Punch:
  • The game opens with one no less; Jonathan succumbs to his bloodlust after being turned and feeds on the nearest person... That turns out to be his sister, Mary, who risked her life trying to find him.
  • Finding out that certain choices had tragic consequences from something minor like a couple of characters turning up as Skals or Sewer Beasts after their significant others had died to major ones like brainwashing Nurse Crane to forget blackmailing Lady Ashbury or leaving Father Hampton to his devices, which will result in them becoming monsters, which sting due to appearing like good options at the time.
• Ron the Death Eater: In opposition to McCullum, this is the fandom's general-purpose treatment of Edgar Swansea – when he's not a Memetic Psychopath in fanfics. It is not unfounded, mind, especially with Swansea's post-Turn dialogue: calling people 'mortals', refusing to discuss those who he's already killed, and distinctly hinting that he's going to feed on his staff and/or patients.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The one-save file per playthrough can be very frustrating considering this is a choice-based narrative game. Once you make an important decision or kill someone, there is no way to reload to an earlier save and make an alternative scenario. Good luck restarting the game several times to see all the different outcomes the story has to offer. That being said, it's still very possible to save scum by manipulating a hidden AppData folder that contains all the save game files.
  • Since the game likes to dish out Player Punch for seemingly good choices with admittedly missable warnings ^spoiler brainwashing Nurse Crane turns out to be a bad choice even though brainwashing was never established to cause madness prior to that point, the lack of multi-save can cause some player to rage quit outright.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: On the Les Yay side of things, Mary Reid and Lady Ashbury are popularly paired up… despite the two never meeting in the game.
• Strangled by the Red String: While not necessarily outright antagonistic, as Lady Ashbury is a guide for Jonathan in the early days of his being a vampire, she still develops a deep level of affection and concern for him in what is at most a week, COUNTING the game mechanic of sleeping through a day to level up as individual days. They both are still relative strangers to one another at this point, and he's still struggling with his new nature, but the three or four conversations they've had lead to her almost declaring love for him at the start of the second act. Although, this may just be Deliberate Values Dissonance since Lady Ashbury was born in the 1500s and therefore she may just have a more archaic opinion on romance and courtship.
• Squick: While the Ekons are fairly nice to look at save for the pale skin and cloudy, dead eyes, Vulkods are tall, disproportionate humanoids with somewhat wolf-like features and dark leathery skin, and even some Skals aren't too stomach-churning to look at, it is undoubtedly the Disaster created from the famous actress Doris Fletcher that takes the cake. Already standing a head taller than Jonathan, after shedding her disguise during the boss fight in the theatre, her whole left arm is shown to be a large, tumorous mass vaguely in the shape of a limb ending in three "fingers" that she can stretch to attack from afar, while the left side of her face looks like the skin is seconds away from being torn off, or even that it's melting like candle wax.
• That One Boss:
  • The Sewer Beast fight in Chapter 2 serves as a taste of things to come in theory, but the extra-aggressive fighting style combined with players being rather low level with few skill options leaves it more frustrating than just a Wake-Up Call Boss.
  • While not a real boss, Infected Nurse Crane can be insanely difficult to beat due to how early on you can face her. Unlike normal Skals, attacking while she's blocking will cause her to spit out a toxic cloud that can drain your health in seconds. If that's not enough, her attack can also poison you, and unlike the poison you get from her cloud, the poison you get now will kill you almost instantly with no amount of healing being enough to slow down the health loss.
  • Mary can be utterly insane if you're under-leveled due to a Pacifist Run. It requires massive amounts of dodging and cherry-tapping to take her down. The fight becomes even harder if you're trying to beat it taking the moral high ground and refusing to kill Vicar Larabee yourself, which means Mary will drain him to regain her health instead.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Embracing people sometimes results not in characters dealing with the loss of a friend or loved one, but them becoming a completely generic enemy that you can only tell apart from the other ones by their inflated level and looking at them with your vampiric sense. It's only very rarely worth Embracing just one person when they have someone who would be affected by their loss.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The players can invoke this themselves while doing a Pacifist Run since feeding on civilians and then witnessing the consequences is one of the integral parts of the game and the above run means you'll miss on a lot of character development and subplots.
  • Yahtzee pointed out in his review of the game that there's not really any need to bother with the angst of choosing which of your friends you chow down on like a McDonald's Happy Meal, because the game simply isn't hard enough that you especially need the experience points you get from it, especially since you gain them from normal combat and completing objectives anyway, rather undermining the big moral choice aspect of the game.