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Critical Reception
September 7, 2026 at 02:57 AM
Initial version (2026-09-07): aggregate launch reception, recurring praise and criticism, and completion times
The Blood of Dawnwalker released on September 3, 2026 to broadly favourable reviews. The review embargo lifted on August 31, three days ahead of release, so a substantial body of criticism was already public before the game reached players. The figures on this page are a snapshot taken during the first week and will move as more reviews and ratings arrive.
Reception is described here in aggregate. Individual outlet scores are not listed, because a spread of numbers from a handful of named publications tends to misrepresent a distribution rather than summarise it.
Measure | Result |
|---|---|
Critic aggregate | 83 out of 100, from 62 critic reviews, inside the generally favourable band. |
Critic distribution | Roughly 89 percent positive, 11 percent mixed, none negative. |
Aggregate user score | 8.1 out of 10 from around 426 ratings. |
Storefront user reviews | Very Positive, with 10,176 of 12,284 reviews recorded as positive. |
Console store player rating | About 4.56 out of 5 from roughly 4,700 ratings, with 82 percent leaving five stars. |
The time-limited structure. The thirty day deadline and the way it forces trade-offs was the single most consistently praised element. See 30-Day Cycle.
Quest writing and the weight of choices, including the way refusing to act is treated as an action in itself. See Narrative Sandbox.
The split between the daytime and nighttime toolkits, which reviewers read as two connected games rather than one game with a night filter. See Skill Trees.
The tone and texture of the valley, its architecture, its plague-era misery and the ordinariness of the people living under vampire rule.
Enemy variety. Movesets were widely described as repetitive over a long campaign, with combat thinning out rather than deepening as the hours accumulate. See Combat.
Console performance and visual polish at launch, on builds that in several cases predated the day-one patch.
The time pressure easing off once the story reaches its point of no return, which several reviewers felt undercut the tension the rest of the game had built. See Time as a Resource.
Reported completion times spread unusually wide, which is a direct consequence of a design that lets the player skip most of its content. Reviewers described the following range.
Route | Approximate time |
|---|---|
Direct route through the story | About 18 hours. |
A fuller run with substantial side content | 35 hours and up. |
Near-exhaustive play | 80 hours and up. |
Developer estimate before release | 50 to 70 hours. |
Two much shorter endings also exist and were noted in coverage: the prologue fight against Brencis can be won, which ends the game roughly three hours in, and Coen can simply leave the valley once the starting area opens up.
Player sentiment on the storefronts ran ahead of the critic aggregate through the first week. Within days of release, community modifications that remove or rework the time pressure had appeared, which is worth reading as a signal about how divisive the central mechanic is rather than as an official feature. Those modifications are community made and are not supported by the studio.
See Update History for the fixes that followed release, and Rebel Wolves for the studio behind the game.
