For a bit of a change this evening, I decided to fire up a game I’ve been meaning to play through and beat for a long time: Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. And, despite its now somewhat dated-looking visuals and inconsistent-quality audio, I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve played so far.

Bloodlines, as it shall be known hereafter, is an interesting game. Based on the White Wolf pen-and-paper role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, itself part of White Wolf’s larger World of Darkness setting, it’s an excellent take on the role-playing genre and a fantastic adaptation of its source material. The reason why it’s so fondly regarded — even with its flaws and bugs necessitating the creation of a community-made patch well after its developers had abandoned it — is because it does things a little differently from other games of a similar type.

Vampire: The Masquerade was a fairly unconventional beast (no pun intended) in its pen-and-paper incarnation, too. Eschewing dungeon-crawling and loot whoring in favour of in-depth role-playing based on a shockingly well-realised world and society — World of Darkness features one of the most richly detailed explanations of vampiric culture since… well, ever, really — Vampire: The Masquerade was a game that rewarded those who sought interesting, unconventional and creative solutions to problems. There was combat, sure, but it was always rather heavily implied that getting into a true fight was something of a last resort for members of vampire society. Rather, you’d make use of your wits, your intelligence, your social skills and your charisma — with a bit of help from your supernatural vampiric abilities — and, more often than not, be able to get through situations without ever drawing your weapon.

Bloodlines is rather similar. It does cater to those players who enjoy the idea of swinging a tyre iron around and caving people’s skulls in — although the combat is, it must be said, rather rudimentary compared to more modern real-time RPGs like The Witcher and Dark Souls — or even those who enjoy first-person shooting. But, for me, far more rewarding is the opportunity to get through most situations by making use of your vampiric powers, which vary according to what kind of character you create at the start of the game.

Much of Vampire: The Masquerade is based on the interactions between various clans of vampires, and each of these clans has its own specialisms. Some have magical abilities; others are strong fighters; others still are true “creatures of the night”, able to disappear into thin air right before their enemies’ eyes. The character I’m playing this time around is a Malkavian; their defining characteristic is the fact that they’re, well, insane — but they can use this fact to their advantage by channeling their mental energy outwards to do things like inflict terror on others or make enemies have hallucinations. In conversation, Malkavians tend to speak in riddles, and, pleasingly, the dialogue options you have available to you when playing as a Malkavian are all borderline gibberish — though the longer you play, the more these riddles will start to make sense to you. Oh, and Malkavians also hear voices while they’re wandering around. And occasionally stop to have a conversation with a roadsign. You get to “roleplay” all of this — something I haven’t seen since the early Infinity Engine games, which featured differing dialogue depending on things like your Intelligence score.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bloodlines is that it uses all these traditional RPG mechanics without putting the player in the usual “god mode” perspective, watching the action unfold from above. No; instead, taking heavy cues from its contemporaries such as Deus Ex and the like, Bloodlines has plenty of “immersive sim” elements about itself, too: hub-based areas to explore, with buildings you can go into and investigate even if the game’s quests haven’t directed you to yet; objects you can pick up and manipulate; computers you can fiddle with by actually typing things into them; and a sense that, in a rather simplistic manner, the world will respond to the way you behave in it.

While we have plenty of open-world, non-linear RPGs today, nothing that’s emerged recently has quite the same feel about it as Bloodlines. I’ve played it through once for about 20 hours or so — though to my shame, I never beat it — and I’m now very interested to take it for another spin with my adorably mental protagonist. If you haven’t yet sampled its bloody charms — and can look past the visuals of a pre-Half-Life 2 Source Engine game — then I strongly recommend you give it a look.