Today we are pleased to show you our review of Thousand Year Old Vampire, a solo role-playing game that brings the hard choices of an immortal into our daily life.
Written by Tim Hutchings, this game has received good feedback from industry critics, obtaining excellent results at the ENnie Award and the Indiecade in 2020. We want to thank the Narrattiva publishing house for bringing this title to Italy. You can buy Thousand Year Old Vampire on the Narrattiva store at a price of € 29.90.
“Observe all those you have loved and hated as they grow old, and eventually turn to dust”
The Art of Thousand Year Old Vampire
Narrattiva has made something amazing in presenting the Italian edition with a work that involved both professionals in the environment and budding writers. Each of them was able to leave their own narrative cue then randomly selected to compose the manual. Each copy of Thousand Year Old Vampire is therefore one of a kind as it contains completely different ideas. In addition, to underline the uniqueness of each single volume, the cover is also created randomly by mixing different graphic elements together to obtain about 12,000 different versions. A huge amount of work carried out with the sole desire to bring us a product that lives up to expectations. We could almost call it a collector’s item. I hope you will agree with me that the effort and work it took to bring this game to life is well worth the price.
Review of the Mechanics of Thousand Year Old Vampire
Let’s say that if a game wins the best regulation award at the ENnies Awards, I start with a fairly high expectation. The Thousand Year Old Vampire mechanics are simple and intuitive. There are two main ways to play it.
- The short game in which we will have to respond with a few lines to the different cues that we will find during the game.
- The game with the diary instead represents a completely different experience since we will write a real chronicle of our life. Each idea is told on a page, and in the end we will have a complete document in our hands that we can reread.
The first part is related to the creation of the vampire. Memories of our mortal past, and the trauma of transformation form the backbone of the tale. From this moment the game proceeds in a semi-random way through the different narrative cues that help us discover the desires of our vampire. We will be forced to make choices, to live the burden of sacrifices, to forget those we once loved and hated.
My Experience with Thousand Year Old Vampire
“The stars revolve above you in the night. The seasons merge. You are like an automaton, unaware of the passage of decades. A century passes. Eliminate a memory. Eliminate all mortal characters.”
My experience with this type of RPG is extremely limited, so I approached Thousand Year Old Vampire with a certain diffidence, not knowing how I would respond to the idea of telling a story to myself. As a player, I am used to playing by taking advantage of the aids given to me by other players and by the master. In this case I had to manage myself and this put me in front of several problems. The first was my lack of order in organizing memories. At the end of the game I found myself in a messy pile of absolutely confused papers. I then created an Excel file with precise tables for the memories, resources and characters, and this helped me a lot, even if it partially reduced the pleasure of writing.
The second problem is perhaps the biggest flaw and at the same time the greatest value of this game. Thousand Year Old Vampire responds in proportion to the commitment that is put into creating the story. We are given an idea of a few lines linked to a theme of a certain depth, and there have been evenings when I was not in the mood to go into the details of how it made me feel to realize that I have lost all the mortal affections I had created in my lifetime. Other nights, however, I was extremely inspired also thanks to an adequate soundtrack in the creation of my story. A fluctuating experience, perhaps too much, at least for me.
Final Consideration
Summing up I have to say that Thousand Year Old Vampire is a really good game. Each game allows us to live a completely new experience and the replay value is limited only by the imagination. I recommend it to everyone, even those who like me have little experience with games of this type. Leaving the comfort zone for once to experience something different turned out to be extremely interesting, absolutely to be tried again in a moment of tranquility in which I will be able to maintain the consistency and mood necessary to carry it on.