Nighthawks: this is who you are in the dark

For all the chaos we see on a seemingly daily basis in the games industry of 2026, good things are still happening. One of my favourite trends is the resurgence of what I like to call, using my own idiosyncratic taxonomy of the genre, the “storytelling RPG”.

This is a very distinctive type of game that has its roots as much in text-based adventure games and tabletop roleplaying as it does in what some might consider more “conventional” computer or console RPGs. It’s a kind of game where you truly inhabit the role of your character by making meaningful choices, and the game takes great pains to tell you — usually primarily through text and dialogue rather than explicit visual depictions such as cinematic cutscenes — what the consequences of those choices are.

There have been many brilliant examples over the years. Planescape: Torment. Disco Elysium. Esoteric Ebb. And now, yes, Nighthawks. Join me after the jump and let’s talk about this remarkable game a bit more.

Nighthawks first showed its undead face back in 2018 with a Kickstarter campaign to fund its development. Writer Richard Cobbett had previously worked on the well-regarded Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, and felt that those games’ modern approach to in-depth, mature interactive fiction would be a good fit for a game based on the urban fantasy of settings such as White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade. Cobbett had a particular love for the classic but flawed PC game, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, and decided that rather than sitting around waiting for a follow-up that might never come, he would just jolly well make one himself.

(Of course, Bloodlines did eventually get that long-awaited sequel in 2025, releasing to a fairly tepid reception after what can politely be termed a… troubled development period. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.)

Cobbett didn’t work alone, of course. From the beginning, he had the backing of Wadjet Eye Games’ head honcho, Dave Gilbert, who would act as executive producer. The game’s distinctive art direction would be in the hands of Ben Chandler — whose other noteworthy work includes a lead artist role on Wadjet Eye’s Unavowed and Old Skies, as well as contributions to other excellent games including Cloak and Dagger’s The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow and Inkle’s Expelled! — and Ivan Ulyanov, co-director of The Charnel House Trilogy. Music would be handled by Thomas Regin, who had previously scored Unavowed, one of Wadjet Eye’s most acclaimed games. And between them, they clearly had a formidable little black book of voice talent to call upon, too.

Eight years (a little longer than the originally intended 18 months), a successful Kickstarter campaign to the tune of over $135,000 and a lot of polishing later, we finally have Nighthawks. And it is a wonderful thing.

In Nighthawks, you play the role of a young vampire who, six months after turning, wants some answers. Your sire’s thrall, one Elijah Morrow, absconded one day with something that was important to you — your last tie to your lost mortal life — and ended up in the one city that purports to offer the undead a second chance at a meaningful life. Ten years ago, the “Veil” fell, and the existence of vampires was revealed to the world; since then, there have been uneasy attempts to commingle between the growing numbers of revenants, and a mortal population that really doesn’t know what to do with the knowledge that monsters actually exist.

Initially, your goal is simple: find Morrow, kick his ass if necessary, get your doohickey back. If you’re able to start a new life for yourself in this city that never sleeps, so much the better, but it’s not going to be easy. You arrive with pretty much nothing; your Sanctuary, a rented room in the grottiest hotel in town, but it’s a place that asks no questions. From here, it’s not long before you get drawn into the inevitable intrigue that happens after the sun goes down. Vampires have a reputation for this sort of thing, after all, and just because humanity knows you exist doesn’t mean there aren’t still some things you are probably best off hiding… for now, at least.

Nighthawks opens with you establishing the background for your character. This includes picking your sire, the bloodline that they are from, any specialist knowledge you bring with you into undeath and your vampiric “Gift”; a special power that, occasionally, you will have the opportunity to make good use of, but “officially”, you’re not supposed to acknowledge you have. The Veil may have fallen, but the revealing of Gifts and their quasi-magical powers may cause humanity to rethink how it feels about vampires.

Interestingly, you don’t set anything about your character’s appearance or gender — though you do choose a name for yourself — meaning “you” can be exactly the person you picture in your head, rather than the one the writers or artists decided you should be. You are free to play that person as you see fit — including choosing how you dress, who you pursue relationships with, and, of course, how you respond to the various situations the game places in front of you.

Those initial choices about your character’s background establish the position you begin the game with in terms of skill levels; these can be worked on in various ways over the course of the game as a whole, but your “innate” knowledge and your vampiric Gift are fixed and cannot be changed. There are no wrong choices up front, however; the game provides ample opportunities to use all knowledge types and all Gifts at various junctures, so just pick which you think best represents you in the dark.

After that, you’re into the game proper. Right away, you’ll meet the magician and burlesque performer Madame Lux, one of the game’s companion characters, and she offers to help you get settled in as you complete what is effectively a tutorial quest: following a lead you have on Morrow’s whereabouts. This quest introduces you to how you interact with the game, how skill checks work, and the fact that most situations have multiple ways to resolve them, meaning it’s never really possible to get yourself into a position where you’re truly “stuck” thanks to a “bad” build.

Nighthawks unfolds almost entirely through text and spoken dialogue. Gilbert namechecked Sunless Sea, 80 Days and Cultist Simulator in the original Kickstarter as games that had successfully shown there was still a market and demand for games that were primarily text-based — and that demand has only continued to grow over time with titles like the aforementioned Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb. Much like early ’80s text adventures allowed for storytelling that depicted things it was impossible to show using the primitive visuals of the day, a text-based game in 2026 allows a narrative-focused game the opportunity to be as ambitious as it likes in terms of the story it is telling without blowing an enormous budget on 3D environments, motion capture and skin pore textures.

And, just as fans of early ’80s adventure games always argued, you don’t need fancy graphics to create a convincing world that draws you in and makes you truly feel part of the narrative. Nighthawks is proof of that, successfully constructing a small-scale but beautifully crafted setting using little more than words and still images; one that comes to feel real by the end of proceedings. The city is a place with many, many problems, but by the end of it all, you will likely come to think of it as “home” in its own peculiar, twisted sort of way — although the exact degree to which you feel like this will at least be partially determined by the various plot threads you engage with over the course of the complete adventure.

I also applaud the game’s willingness to namecheck real-life things such as movies, books, TV shows and suchlike. All too often scriptwriters worry about references such as this infringing on copyright or trademarks, and it always feels quite artificial when such references are written around or alluded to. Nighthawks is a game quite happy for the character who looks a bit like Alyson Hannigan to chew another character out on the grounds that “no, she can’t introduce you to Buffy”.

Nighthawks unfolds over the course of five main Acts. During each Act, there is some form of “crisis” brewing, set to erupt in a month’s time, and it’s your job to resolve it before bad things happen. Said “crises” begin as the relatively mundane — your rent being due — and end up with you playing a crucial role at several important, defining moments for both humanity and the vampires. To resolve the main crisis for each Act, you have a series of mandatory quests known as Obligations that you have to complete; aside from that, optional other opportunities, known as Investigations, will reveal themselves as your reputation grows, and of course, each of your possible companions also have their own storylines to follow, too.

This structure strikes a great balance between providing you with freedom to explore the city and determine how best you want to define yourself as a creature of the night, and giving you something concrete to aim for. While some may baulk at the idea of a time limit, in practice you have more than enough time in every Act to complete your Obligations, all the possible Investigations and any companion storylines you want to pursue, and still have time left over to pursue any looser goals that you might want to achieve, such as improving your stats, proving your worth at the city’s underground fight club, or mapping the extensive sewer network as a means of quickly getting around.

As you take various actions and make choices, you will start to accumulate Traits, which are permanent records of things you have done. Some of these take effect immediately upon you performing a particular action — for example, you permanently lose the “Consensualist” trait the first time you feed on an unsuspecting, non-consenting victim — while others require you to pursue them as their own informal mini-quests, some of which take most of the game to come to fruition. As well as providing a fun list of things that your character has accomplished, many (though not all) Traits also confer permanent stat bonuses, allowing you to gradually improve all of your skills simply by attempting to use them — even if the attempts are unsuccessful. The higher a skill is, the more likely that skill checks will succeed — though there are some tests of all your skills at various points that you will never, no matter how good you are, be able to succeed at. These all make narrative sense: sometimes you’re just so outclassed, or the situation is so extraordinary, that even with top-tier knowledge and skills, you don’t know what to do.

Skill checks are handled less explicitly than titles like Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb. When confronted with an opportunity to use one of your skills, you will be given an idea of how likely you are to succeed, ranging from “no chance” to “guaranteed success”. Combat is similar; you are presented with your chances, and continuing to engage in combat (which you don’t always have a choice about if things have already escalated to the possibility of a fight) will cause the encounter to unfold automatically, costing you some of your vitality in the process, with the exact amount determined by whether or not you have an advantage over your opponent, and by how much.

No explicit dice rolls are carried out in those zones where neither success or failure are certain, but it is possible to both succeed at things that you anticipate will be a difficult test of your skills, and fail at things you think have a moderate chance to succeed at. Evidently there are some sort of dice rolls happening under the hood, but obfuscating the actual values from the player is a sensible option that discourages the occasionally ridiculous behaviour that you’d sometimes exhibit in Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, where coming back with a different shirt on would make you more likely to be able to accomplish your goals.

Actually, thinking about it, bizarre behaviour like that is perfectly in character for the… unusual protagonists of both Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, but the point is that it doesn’t really make a ton of sense for your character here. As such, once you’re in the middle of something that involves a skill check, you generally get one shot at it, with there usually being no opportunity to retreat, go and pick up a different item of equipment and try again. There are items of clothing, weapons and accessories that boost your stats while you have them equipped — plus each of the game’s companion characters will boost several stats simply by virtue of their presence — but “what to wear” is generally a decision you make at the start of the night, and not something you can usually change when you’re in the middle of a particularly delicate situation.

The best example of how this works comes when you reach the culmination of a particular Obligation or Investigation’s storyline. Here, the screen will generally fade to black, display an “episode” title, and from that point on, you are locked in to bringing that particular story to its conclusion rather than having the freedom to wander. On paper, it might sound a little artificially limiting, but in practice it prevents the problem some RPGs have where supposedly “important” events will politely wait for you to be good and ready to come and resolve them while you go and pick flowers, burgle local wizards, slay dragons or whatever.

It’s during these sequences that Nighthawks is at its most inventive, creative and memorable, because none of them unfold in quite the same way. Some are relatively “passive” experiences that just involve you being in the right place at the right time, perhaps chiming in with a few thoughts; some involve you having to complete skill challenges or perhaps use your Gift to achieve something, or improvise if your skills aren’t up to the job; some are relatively elaborate affairs that require you to figure out exactly what is expected of you and then successfully achieve it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that any of them are really a “puzzle” as such, but there is always a feeling that you are involved, and that you have an important role to play in the scene. Occasionally there’s a bit of convenient deus ex machina, usually in the form of a companion just happening to be passing by while you’re in a particularly perilous situation, but this never feels too contrived; the game takes great pains to highlight that all the main characters have their own lives that are unfolding independently of yours, and thus it’s perfectly plausible that someone might stumble across your predicament by chance. Indeed, there are times when you stumble across them in a predicament of their own, and you can, of course, return the favour (or be owed one) when this happens.

At no point does the “vampire” thing feel like it limits or holds back the game in any way. The situations you encounter run the gamut from comedic silliness to absolutely horrifying, and you generally have a lot of choice as to how you respond to them. You are by no means railroaded into being either a “good” or an “evil” vampire; one of the core points the narrative as a whole makes is that despite their differences from humanity, vampires are still just people. Some of them are fine, upstanding members of the community; others are hateful little shits. Many others still are two-faced fuckers who will stab you in the back at the first opportunity, but there are also some who will become true friends. Everyone, however, is complex, and has their own story as to how they ended up where they are tonight.

It’s those shades of grey where Nighthawks is at its most interesting and thought-provoking, and your available companions very much encompass a variety of approaches to the night. None of them are truly squeaky-clean — not even the few non-vampire companions — but some are more explicitly amoral than others. There are different approaches to this; most players will, for example, likely feel differently about the con artist vampire, Maze, and the human photojournalist-turned-detective who primarily makes rent each month through blackmail, Domino Quick; both have questionable morals, but both have very different attitudes towards their own knowledge of that fact.

Interestingly, there is the option to make some fairly… permanent decisions about some of these party members at various points in the game. These decisions feel meaningful and worthwhile; one in particular is as the culmination of a long and emotionally challenging storyline that spans two separate Acts, and it is very satisfying to bring it to a conclusion, however things end up going.

Moral vacuum or not, all the companions are a delight to get to know, and they’re a varied bunch. Aside from the aforementioned Maze, Domino and Madame Lux, there’s Agatha, the self-professed “Empress of Rats”, who is over a hundred years old but got turned into a vampire when she was eleven, so is perpetually stuck in a child’s body; there’s Inez Salamandra, a foul-mouthed former pirate struggling to adjust to life in the 21st century; there’s Saoirse the Irish bruiser with a heart of gold, who is initially set up to be incredibly intimidating but ends up being one of the most likable characters by far; there’s Veronica, an aristocratic vampire with an acidic sense of deadpan humour, who hails from a prestigious but secretive (and brutal) family; there’s Alex, a young man caught between his faith and a growing desire to understand what vampires are all about; and there’s Finn, a biker gang leader growing increasingly weary with the intrigue and politics of a city he used to love.

What’s really fun about the companions is that not only do they interact with you, often bringing their own opinions to the various Obligations and Investigations you bring them along on, but they also interact with one another. When you head to the bar of the eponymous nightclub, Nighthawks, you’ll often find them chatting to one another — or, more commonly, attempting to find ways to get one over on one another, both in jest and as a serious attempt to demonstrate their position and power. These relationships between the companion characters develop over the course of the game, much as your relationships with them evolve, and these little incidental conversations are a big part of what makes the world of Nighthawks feel so alive.

Speaking of the club, Nighthawks, you eventually find yourself taking ownership of the place after the dramatic events that conclude the first main Act of the story. Initially, you’re given the option to remodel the place in several styles and determine how the bar staff dress, and then, each in-game week, you’re given the opportunity to give the club’s manager “projects” to work on. These can benefit the club, which in turn will bring more money your way; they might benefit individuals or groups, which will cause them to think more favourably on you personally; or you can invest in yourself, allowing you the opportunity to passively train and increase your skills at random at the end of each day.

“Running” the club doesn’t take up much of the game’s time at all, but unsurprisingly, the physical location ends up being a focal point for the story. Not only is it the default place you’ll find all your companions hanging out — along with your long-suffering bartender, Becca, who has to put up with a hell of a lot of shit over the course of the game as a whole — but it’s also the place where a lot of the most significant narrative moments happen. You also gradually build up your reputation as the club’s owner through your various deeds around the city, and this is reflected both in how people respond to you, and in the news stories that appear on your in-game phone each evening. By the end of the game, there’s a real, genuine sense that people know who you are — and either appreciate or fear what you’ve been getting up to.

Since Nighthawks is such a narrative-centric game, I’m loathe to spoil too many details, as it really is a game best experienced by just jumping in and seeing where things take you. As such, I will just talk in general terms, and note that the game handles its core subject matter with a great deal of sensitivity and grace.

There are some obvious allegories at play throughout, with the way vampires are treated with mistrust and outright prejudice regrettably mirroring the way some people in our own world are complete shits to each other, but the game also doesn’t shy away from highlighting the fact that vampires, thanks to their supernatural abilities, have plenty of options for making other people’s lives (mortal or otherwise) miserable in some truly depraved ways. That said, the game also makes it clear that there are plenty of shitty humans around, too, and that being a “good” or “bad” person is not determined by whether or not you have fangs, but rather through your actions, choices and responses to situations.

The game’s latter hours invite you to consider some of the possible extremes that various viewpoints depicted in the game might result in over the long term, and whether or not you want to be a part of any of that. It is near-impossible to build a true utopia just for humans, after all, so attempting to build one that serves both vampires and humans is surely a fool’s errand… or is it?

You can conclude the game in several different ways, according to how you want to resolve matters, if at all. Just walking away, either alone or with a companion, is an option, too. Ultimately the choice is yours, and you will doubtless find an ending that you feel fits with the way you played the rest of the game. I certainly did, and I came away from the game feeling satisfied that this particular chapter of my character’s story had come to a worthwhile and meaningful conclusion.

Nighthawks is a brilliant game. It’s beautifully written, brilliantly voice acted and presented through stunning, stylish art and wonderfully atmospheric music. It successfully crafts one of the most compelling game worlds I’ve inhabited for a very long time using little more than text and still images, and I feel like the whole experience is going to stick with me for a very long time.

While it’s a very different sort of game to the classic Bloodlines, its philosophy is very similar: provide a compelling, immersive, involving and emotionally engaging simulation of what it’s like to stalk the night as a modern-day vampire — whatever that might mean to you. So if you’ve been holding out hope for a true successor to the venerable flawed classic, give Nighthawks a go. You won’t regret it.

Also there’s a scene where a character farts non-stop for several minutes, and you get an achievement for listening to the whole thing. God bless video games.

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More about Nighthawks

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