The Blood of Dawnwalker is a Special Kind of Open World RPG with a Narrative Sandbox

The Blood of Dawnwalker was always going to be compared to The Witcher 3, and there really isn't any way around that. Rebel Wolves was founded by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the Game Director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and its ranks include numerous developers who worked on The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077. Creative Director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz was The Witcher 3's Lead Quest Designer. Narrative Director Jakub Szamałek worked on both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

Combat flow, UI designs, and even the way conversations are framed, quests unfold, and the landscape of Vale Sangora stretches out in front of you can feel immediately familiar. To be clear: none of that is a bad thing. After spending the last couple of weeks sinking my teeth (pun intended) into this new brand of open-world epic, there's a lot more going on here.

As of the time of this writing, pre-launch, The Blood of Dawnwalker has an average Metacritic score of 83 after the first 52 critic reviews. I personally played the game on PS5 Pro with a few minor technical hiccups (one crash over 15 hours, some texture glitches, and very minor framerate hiccups on Balanced Mode), but none of that really bothered me and will hopefully be better once the Performance Mode is out at launch.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is built in Unreal Engine 5, a notable change for a studio containing so many developers accustomed to CD Projekt Red's proprietary REDengine. Rebel Wolves has spoken openly about why it chose Unreal, and the reasoning isn't merely graphical fidelity.

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz described stability as one of the major advantages of using an established engine. Maintaining a proprietary engine requires enormous engineering resources simply to keep development moving, he explained, whereas Unreal allows the team to spend more time focused directly on improving the game. He also noted that hiring becomes easier because incoming developers may already know the technology.

Environment Artist Adam Payet has explained that neither technology is a "silver bullet," but both give artists considerably more freedom when constructing environments once they're used properly. Nanite reduces some of the traditional compromises involved in bringing high-density assets into a game, while Lumen gives the team much greater flexibility with dynamic lighting.

One of the best ideas in The Blood of Dawnwalker is the concept of its narrative sandbox. In the game, Coen has 30 days and nights to deal with the vampires controlling Vale Sangora and rescue his family. That sounds like the setup for a stressful countdown timer, but that's not really how it works. Time isn't constantly ticking while you're wandering around the countryside, reading item descriptions, or figuring out whether you want to climb that mountain in the distance. It's used more like a resource, with big moments from questlines consuming it. You can also voluntarily skip ahead since certain events or quests are only available during either the night or day.

Rebel Wolves Design Director Daniel Sadowski previously explained that distinction by saying the system only advances when players engage with meaningful content because the studio didn't want time to exist simply to rush them. Instead, the point was ensuring that both "action and inaction have consequences."

In a lot of ways, it feels like an evolution of the countdown timer from the first Fallout game on PC, but with a lot more nuance now.

I'm generally skeptical of time limits in RPGs because they can run directly against what I enjoy most about the genre: exploration and immersion. I like to get distracted and stumble across a character in a village and suddenly spend an hour dealing with a problem I didn't know existed.

Thankfully, Dawnwalker somehow manages to preserve all of that while making my decisions feel more important. There is always another problem I could be solving, but there is also always something I'm choosing not to solve, and that's the key.

On a single playthrough, it's literally impossible to see everything the game has to offer, and depending on which NPCs live or die, entire questlines may not exist for you.

In one conversation, my Coen was overcome with his vampiric lust for blood since I hadn't fed in a while, so he lost control and drained the character I was in the middle of speaking to, ending that questline. Things like that can happen here, which is extremely exciting to me.

Characters can die, opportunities disappear, and problems develop without you. Information learned from one quest can completely alter your options somewhere else. Some characters can become allies, while others might never survive long enough for you to discover what role they could have played.

In a game like The Witcher 3, you could play a dozen hours of Gwent, knowing that Ciri needs you, because she will still be there to save when you've finished your diversion. But in Dawnwalker, it's like the developers are exploring what happens in a world of more realistically finite time.

I'm still in the first half or so of the game, but there have already been quests I desperately wanted to pursue but couldn't justify at that particular moment. There were people I wanted to help even though doing so wasn't necessarily the strategically sensible decision. There were other situations where I made the cold calculation that whatever happened to these people simply wasn't as important as getting closer to my actual objective.

I've also fed on people after saving them to satiate Coen's hunger and still get that sweet quest reward XP. I still feel bad about that one.

Rebel Wolves calls this approach a Narrative Sandbox, which Creative Director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz has described as an attempt to maximize player agency without sacrificing authored storytelling. Rather than separating a cinematic main quest from a collection of disconnected side activities, smaller stories are intentionally connected back into the broader narrative so that the world feels like a cohesive whole.

Dawnwalker's quests don't feel like a checklist of "main quests" and "side quests" so much as a network of problems happening simultaneously across Vale Sangora. You're simply deciding which threads to pull. That creates an astonishing amount of reactivity. I regularly found myself wondering whether a particular scene was something every player would see, only to discover later that it existed because of some obscure decision I'd made hours earlier.

Coen exists between humanity and vampirism. During the day, he's much closer to a traditional human warrior, relying on swordsmanship and witchcraft-themed magic. At night, his vampiric abilities open an entirely different toolset.

Suddenly I could teleport, walk up walls, feed on my enemies, and approach encounters in ways that simply weren't possible several hours earlier during daylight. It's essentially two overlapping versions of the same RPG, complete with various skill trees that even progress independently.

There are still several major games left in 2026, so declaring a Game of the Year in August would be premature. But from what I've played and based on my own interests, The Blood of Dawnwalker is absolutely on my shortlist.

More than anything, it reminded me what I want from a huge RPG. Not a bigger map, not another hundred icons, and not another 150-hour checklist. I want a world that makes me curious about what happens if I push on it. The Blood of Dawnwalker kept giving me answers, and very often, they weren't the answers I expected.

The Blood of Dawnwalker releases on September 3 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

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