I want to like this game a lot more than I do, and I think I'm actually cutting it more slack than I should. I did enjoy it, but I can't say it's good. And I think that if I had free reign with the assets I could make a better game. I'm not saying you shouldn't buy it (although I am definitely saying that you shouldn't pay almost $30 for - get it when it's on extreme discount like I did) but do be aware that it's more atmosphere than story and more interactive cutscene than game.
First I'll get the technical gripes out of the way. The interface is shit: the controls are inconvenient and can't be remapped; the transition animations are annoyingly slow; the "hunger" indicator is inconsistent and hard to read. There are no manual saves so you can't go back and make a different decision, which wouldn't be an issue except that sometimes dialogue choices are misleading. I prefer games to tell me exactly what my character will say before I make my choice. I don't mind games that make me choose a tone or intent but leave the wording a surprise. I hate games like this where you have to infer the tone and intent from a précis of what your character will say, because there will always be occasions where you assume a particular tone that is completely different to the one that was intended.
A further complaint about the dialogue system is that a lot of the choices aren't really choices. You can pick from three options, but they're all so similar as to make no difference. You're free, in some instances to, adopt the tone you want, but in others you have no choice but to act out of character (at least, as far as the character exists in your mind, given the previous choices you've made). This would likely not be as big a problem if the character was more clearly defined, but a lot of blanks are left for the player to fill in, and I found that it was difficult to get a handle on who the player character (Ventrue, in my case, as I haven't tried the other two options) actually was. A lot of what is revealed about them over the course of the game seems inconsistent.
It's also difficult to get a handle on the other characters; this generally isn't a problem because most of them are supposed to be new acquaintances who are living secretive lives and, in most cases, putting on some kind of act to create a public persona. But there are characters the writers seem to want you to regard as having become your character's friends by the end of the game, and that's a problem because neither those characters nor your character's interactions with them are written with enough depth or charm for that to be the case. And some of them are just bad.
Then there's the story. The individual vignettes that make up the majority of the plot are fine. Not great, but fine. There's enough there to keep your interest, if you don't mind how obvious it is that there are essentially no branches in these plots and your interaction with them is minimal. But the main, overarching plot is bad. The ending comes completely out of nowhere and the villain of the piece is revealed to be... some guy you saw in the background one time. It's not that it leaves plot threads dangling, it's that it didn't bother to weave any in the first place.
If the writing had been better it wouldn't have mattered so much that there's no real player agency. If there'd been proper branching narratives it wouldn't have mattered so much that the writing was lacking. If it had any strengths they could have balanced the weaknesses, but unfortunately it doesn't. It's just OK in every respect. Not good, not bad, just fine. So there's nothing I can point to and say "it's worth playing for this" and nothing I can point to and say "nah, it's garbage." It's thoroughly mediocre.
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