Nighthawks
Release Date: September 22, 2026
Developer: The Curiosity Engine
Publisher: Wadjet Eye Games
MSRP: To Be Determined

It’s difficult for me to stop playing Nighthawks.

The vampire game (and are all the good vampire games these days text-based? Between the New York trilogy, The Night Road, and Nighthawks it certainly seems like it) is a whirlpool, one that sucks you in with a strange murder mystery and then expands the world gradually by degrees, with you navigating a shadowy underbelly of your new home city while also desperately trying to keep human and vampire relations from erupting into war in the streets.

You are a fledgling vampire. You recently journeyed to a city on the Twin Rivers, a sanctuary where humans and vampires coexist after the fall of “the Veil” keeping vampires in the shadows and away from humans. Your mission? Find out what happened to a thrall of your sire who also came to the city and mysteriously disappeared. This task sends you pinballing across the city, from the mean streets of Cradlebridge to the hushed halls of Fountaincourt, picking up a variety of miscreants and major players with every decision you leave in your wake. Will you be the Beast of Cradlebridge, a pillar of the community, or a political operator willing to pull whatever strings you can to ensure the city’s balance? No matter what you do, you and the city will never be the same.

Nighthawks is a text adventure with what’s now becoming a familiar interface. On the right side of the screen is the text, scrolling ever upward as you select dialogue options and skills from the options. An interface at the bottom keeps track of your health, blood, stats, and skills. Every option you pick takes a minute’s worth of time off the clock. You have from sundown to sunup to take actions, improve skills, and eventually scuttle back to the hole in the wall where you live. As you move forward day by day, a countdown advances towards the doom at the end of the act. This creates a ticking clock, making the individual actions and dialogue choices much weightier every time you make a move. Fallen London and Sunless Skies (of which this game shares a writer, Richard Cobbett) fans will immediately recognize the stat and skill challenge system, which tells you how difficult a possible roll will be, here also color-coded with red, orange, and green indicators for how difficult the challenge actually is. Lavish illustrations depict the scenes and locales you find yourself in, everywhere from the hot tub rendezvous with vampire edgelord PR wizard Monika Vail to the sewers beneath your home turf of Cradlebridge.

A game this vast and interconnected requires excellent writing, and Nighthawks has that in spades. Not just in the main plot that casts you as a down-at-the-heels vampire PI who finds themselves investigating a series of escalating nested conspiracies and shadowy acts of war in a city always on the edge of a blowup, but in the individual interactions with characters and the side plots as well. Cobbett’s writing shifts from grotesque to comic to horrifying to tragic with deft and instantaneous turns, an operatic verbal duel of wits with the Devil turning into a petty lover’s tiff and back again in a number of moments, to say nothing of the multi-track line-crossing “should I be laughing at this” hilarity of vampire mad scientist Dr. Samuel and the aforementioned Monika Vail. It’s never jarring, as the writers and voice actors (many of the characters are fully voiced) give these people a level of humanity and depth, whether that’s the snarky undead stage magician and unrepentant partier Madame Lux or the sleazy, abusive human-trafficking vampire book dealer and cult leader Maze. There are also some truly disturbing quests, one that involves you exploring human-supremacist and vampire-supremacist dystopias, a quest line about bringing Samuel dissection subjects, and perhaps most disturbingly a quest where you investigate a vampire’s twisted little game involving child abuse, animal cruelty, and even more unprintable acts.

Nighthawks is evocative. When it wants you to feel something, you feel it hard. It isn’t relentlessly grim— the humor helps a lot with that— but this is a dark world and even though you and your companions are perhaps a lighter shade of dark and nasty, the game reminds you that it’s a horror game, and a nastily effective one at that. There are vampire concentration camps, police brutality, race riots, serial murder, and ritual sacrifice all handled realistically and with great sensitivity.

Adding a layer to this, there are hangout sections in the titular nightclub Nighthawks that see an escalating prank war between eternally patient bartender Becca and vampire pirate queen Ines, Maze annoying everyone with pseudointellectualism, and the slowly defrosting art thief Veronica. It makes it feel like the bar is a respite from the chaos around you and the fact that the various companions and friends you meet start hanging out there regularly helps with that. It turns into a home as much as it is anything else, which of course means when someone tries to start something in that home turf, it drives home the danger all the more.

With the choices having actual weight and time, it also makes each one feel like a major decision. I went back and forth playing certain scenes, trying to figure out which way each one would break, and eventually just decided to go with the flow. A lot of games say “choices matter” and a lot of gamers talk about the world and story mattering, but Nighthawks makes sure you feel like it does, every step of the way. Choices you make in side quests can even come back and create more opportunities in the main quests, like someone whose life you saved coming back later to help you in your final decisions.

The problem is when Nighthawks wants to have rails, it will by God have those rails. While the majority of skill rolls are hidden, if you max out specific skills, suddenly the hidden impossible choices become very obvious. It gets even worse when, playing on a relatively “good” route, I thought I had an act ending in the bag only for the narrative turn to flip at the last possible moment and leave me literally railroaded into the final act. It was shocking, but the shock was mainly frustration as by then I’d had enough of my work pay off that the game told me I wasn’t in any danger, only for it to go “whoops, you still lose.” The “whoops, you still lose” was exhausting and made me feel like my choices only mattered until the story told me they didn’t.

Speaking of frustrating, the sewers are entirely an exhausting part of the game. Despite being absolutely essential to certain quest lines and companion storylines, they require mapping by hand or memorizing the system junctures, which is something I’d wished I’d known going in. They’re not the most annoying sewers in a vampire game (thank you, Tzmisce Warrens) but the amount of nights I wasted clicking through a maze of twisty passages all alike where the only breaks the repetition are Civvie11 jokes about sewers and the occasional fight with a feral vampire in between fumbling all the way from one end of the city to another can’t be overstated.

The time system is also more of a crunch than it’s perhaps meant to be. While sunrise is at 6 AM every day, if you’re not back in front of your sanctuary by 5, you need to check your SPF. If you’re outside Cradlebridge after 3:30 AM, chances are you might be getting roasted, depending on how long it takes. This adds a nice bit of tension to the process, but also makes it really annoying, as you have to plan your actions not to the ultimate end of the night, but way earlier in the hopes that you won’t get hit by sunlight. Later chapters make this easier, but the quirks are still a little rough.

Despite this, they are just quirks.

Nighthawks is a masterful adventure/RPG, a game that’s mature without being edgy, grotesque without being gauche, and deep without being either exhausting or falling into the usual pitfalls of changing a bunch of surface things without changing anything else. It’s a big, deep, beautiful, bloody pool, and you owe yourself the opportunity to dive right in and experience all its horrors and delights. When this drops on the 22nd, hopefully you’ll be the first through Nighthawks’ velvet rope.

The Good:
- Deep, unnerving story with a lot of cool sidequests
- Excellent character writing and moment-to-moment story that makes the world feel lived-in
- Easy-to-understand skill system that fits seamlessly into play
- Ticking clock gives the world weight
- Fantastic voice acting and art direction

The Bad:
- Bad sewer mazes are not a mark of quality
- Some segments feel more like railroading

Final Score:

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