I was vaguely looking forward to the grimy dark fantasy RPG The Blood Of Dawnwalker, despite its flirtations with genAI. To recap, it introduces you as a young medieval vampire whose family has been kidnapped by another vampire leader. You have 30 days and 30 nights to save your loved ones while deciding at what point you will succumb to this gory curse.
It sounds stressful, but the game’s time modeling is quite forgiving: each day is divided into timed segments, with time only ticking when you make certain choices. Additionally, you can “bend” time by offering the teeth of murdered people to the Tooth Fairy.
The fairies in question are called Sanzhana. They look like chubby, half-human butterflies, with blue skin and whispering wings. Our friends from Ian Games I have a video where we see one in action, harvesting enamel from discarded corpses in a ring of red mushrooms. They regularly barter with bandits and other deplorables for pearly and less pearly whites. You can get into the incisor business yourself, if you really have to. Be careful, the Sanzhana do not pay their teeth in coins: they are capable of playing with the clock in indeterminate ways.
“They let you play with the time limit,” creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz told IGN, “because there are a lot of myths around leprechauns that they can do things to alter time. And for us, since our game revolves so much around the time system, that was something cool to play with.
“I think it’s very cool, when you do systemic things, to have exceptions and consequences that have an impact that you didn’t anticipate,” he continued. “It creates the feeling that something unexpected could happen at any moment and that there are still secrets to be discovered.”
I have so many questions. First, do certain varieties of teeth confer particular flavors of time mastery? For example, what can I get for a vampire’s fang, compared to the premolars of a poor turnip farmer I met on the way to the market?
Second, can I hand over my own teeth, and can I buy those teeth back with my excess hours if I discover a quest shortcut? Third, can I kill literally everyone in The Blood of Dawnwalker and launch their helicopters into a mushroom circle, like when I pile corpses into a single closet in Hitman? Exactly how many sets of teeth are there in The Blood of Dawnwalker, and how many days, months, or years does that equate to? By the way, are there sharks in The Blood of Dawnwalker? And if so, can I constantly growing shark teeth to stop time from moving forward?
Be warned, Tomaszkiewicz: I am now dangerously invested in the concept of dental time economics. If this turns out to be some sort of glorified checkpoint function, I’ll leave all of my crappiest molars under your pillow. The Blood of Dawnwalker launches in September.
