The Indie Informer

I’ve spent the majority of my weekend trying desperately to come up with a better way to say this, a way that doesn’t feel as crass, a more elegant way to praise a game, but I’ve drawn a genuine blank. There is no other way to say: Bloodthief is badass.

A bit of text in gothic font flashes across the screen: “A terror has unleashed on our realm. Ghoulish footsoldiers stalk the streets, and the cityfolk cower in their homes. Meanwhile the king, our protector, feasts on stuffed pheasant and sleeps soundly in his bedroom.” The text fades, and a new, simple sentence appears. “Tonight the king dies by your hand, Vampire.”

It’s difficult to properly emphasize how good of a hook this is for a game. It essentially says, “Here’s what’s going on, here’s who needs to pay, and you’re the one who’s going to take care of things.” It’s straight to the point and moody, which represents everything you need to know about Bloodthief as a game. Bloodthief is a fast-paced, first-person slasher where you play as a vampire, cutting your way through countless castle guards and speeding to the end of the level as fast as you can. There’s a major emphasis on momentum and movement speed as the game encourages you to find shortcuts and improve your time. Most enemies die in one hit and, if you haven’t feasted on a healthy amount of blood to supercharge your health, you die in one hit also.

Bloodthief is a gothic take on games like Hotline Miami and Neon White, where careful planning and proper execution are the difference between completing a level in the blink of an eye and meeting an inopportune death that kills your shot at ending up high on the leaderboard. It’s quick and requires twitch reflexes, which can be frustrating after multiple failed attempts, but when I finally pulled off that move I had been practicing for 15 minutes, I was literally jumping to my feet in celebration.

Some of Bloodthief’s levels can be brutally difficult. At times, it can feel like the game is cheating by spawning hundreds of deadly spiders all at once to attack you or pushing you through a gauntlet of precise platforming sequences that require pinpoint precision, however, the game can only push on you so hard before you begin to push back and realize that you can “cheat” too. I had a galaxy-brained moment when I realized that I could gain speed instantly by jumping and sliding. This exponentially increased my speed and would work on any surface, even when going uphill. In that moment, I was transformed from a vampire who quickly darts around a level, parrying guards and engaging with the combat mechanics into a vampiric freight train that whips around corners and blasts through enemies before they even have the chance to raise their swords.

There’s a frenetic energy to Bloodthief that makes you want to try levels over and over again until they become muscle memory. I was never satisfied with my times on the scoreboard, I could always find ways to shave off a second or two between enemy encounters. That desire for rerunning levels is fed by the sheer amount of shortcuts that Bloodthief opens up to you as soon as you start getting new weapons that completely change the way you can interact with the world. For example, there’s a hand crossbow that can blow holes in walls, literally blowing the potential for speedrunning a level wide open.

The one major problem I have with the game is that it encourages you to go as fast as you can and punishes your mistakes instantly; however, to respawn after dying, you need to hold a button down for several seconds. It’s not the end of the world, but for a game that’s obsessed with its breakneck pacing, it feels like everything grinds to a halt for a few seconds while you get ready to restart. It’s a minor gripe, but when I was dying over and over again while trying to master specific platforming or combat sequences, those seconds of waiting became excruciating.

Bloodthief has a lot of style and substance. The text that flashed on screen when the game started was enough to get me fully invested, and as soon as I was jumping from rooftop to rooftop, cutting through guards and sliding around corners, I knew that Bloodthief had its teeth in me. There was a certain shock that came just a few levels in. I thought I knew where Bloodthief was going, but just like the twists on the combat as you unlock new weapons or discover new ways to absolutely style on the game’s mechanics, the game took me in a completely different direction. A direction that had me staying up late to complete as many levels as I could and retrying levels over and over again to beat my own high scores.