Vigil - Blood Bitterness Demo

Sometimes, original ideas and new approaches are exactly what the world needs, especially after a long period of nothing out of the ordinary and painful routine. However, these new approaches can also fail miserably as well, because it’s just as easy to miss the point entirely. Even so, originality is always worth a try, regardless of how the end result turns out to look like.

Vigil - Blood Bitterness is a third-person adventure game with not a lot of joy in it, which is pretty clear from the first few minutes. Although this is not exactly a pure point-and-click adventure game, given the weird perspective, it does control almost exactly like one, so you’ll only need your mouse in most cases, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

Story-wise, the writers decided to go a tad too far on the meta side and the entire thing turned out somewhat fuzzy and pretentious, with nothing too clear and nothing too frightening either. Everything seems to be revolving around the main character that’s under your control, named Dehon, but exactly who or what are you are after is never really detailed.

The puzzles are not exactly mind-bending, but they can get the wheels moving again in the old noodle if you really want to put in the effort. It is also possible to stumble upon clues regarding the creature you are after, which are categorized as follows: video, audio, text, and pictures. They’re not of too much help separately, but you can extract information if you manage to put them all head-to-head.

On the other hand, you might start to ask yourself if it is worth the bother, because things get out of hand pretty quickly when it comes to the technical aspect. Hence, the artwork is indeed nice and unique, but it’s no use if you do not get a chance to admire it properly. The game crashes every other few minutes, especially if you happen to touch certain things or face the wrong way at the wrong time.

On a closing note, it must be mentioned that Vigil - Blood Bitterness had the potential to turn into something great if the developers had kept their composure until the end. Since that did not happen, all this got to be is a half-finished game with a lot of technical issues and a few good ideas that will never get the recognition they deserve.