The Blood of Dawnwalker Review: An RPG for The Witcher Fans

In this The Blood of Dawnwalker Review, we’re going to be talking about one of the most anticipated RPGs releasing in 2026, and the best game I saw at Gamescom last year, The Blood of Dawnwalker. Coming from a new studio, Rebel Wolves, which consists of developers who have worked on the Witcher series, The Blood of Dawnwalker promises to deliver an engrossing RPG set in a low-fantasy medieval setting. In this review, I’ll tell you whether Rebel Wolves succeeded in delivering a memorable experience or not, and whether it’s a day-one purchase or to wait for a sale.

Story and Setting

The Blood of Dawnwalker is set in medieval times, AD 1347, somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains of Europe. This is a dark era when a plague ravages most of the continent, compounding the harsh living conditions under the tyranny of local lords. The player takes on the role of Coen, the eldest son of a humble family living in the fictional Vale Sangora.

As a narrative-heavy and story-driven game, the story sets the tone early on, with an intense cinematic where Coen and his younger sister, Lunka, are hunted down by soldiers since she is suspected of carrying the plague. The situation changes dynamically and radically when a faction known as the Vrakhir intervene, curing Lunka’s plague with their blood, and taking over the valley at large, replacing the existing rulers.

The Vrakhir fail to turn Coen, and instead change him into something else entirely: a Dawnwalker, who refuses to do their bidding. With his family captured, he sets out on a journey against the clock to save them before they are killed. This sets a tense pace for the game, forcing Coen to make quick, pointed decisions that drive the plot forward at every turn. He will meet many different characters with their own objectives and agendas, which sometimes go against Coen’s own. This triggers many situations with complex moral tones, forcing Coen to make difficult decisions about whether to prioritize saving his family first or work towards taking down the Vrakhir to free all the people of the valley.

These kinds of games demand a commitment to nuanced writing to deliver the emotional impact of morally ambiguous choices. In this regard, Rebel Wolves have done a fantastic job and fully deploy a complex, interesting, and compelling narrative that weaves seamlessly into side quests, missions, and activities. This is an important detail that many games miss and should be lauded as an achievement: it never feels like you are just doing random activities instead of focusing on doing what you should be doing in terms of the narrative. Whether you are exploring and killing monsters or focusing on destroying outposts of soldiers loyal to the Vrakhir, they all serve the purpose of helping Coen save his family from their impending death.

Overall, the story is the strongest point of the game, and I found it emotionally engaging and well crafted, so I feel it will not disappoint the core audience that comes looking for that interactive narrative experience.

Gameplay Review

RPG Mechanics

The Blood of Dawnwalker is an RPG with a heavy focus on Coen as a character and his mission to save his family. As such, it has a strong emphasis on dialogue choices and trying to make the best possible ones to save your family, gain allies, and strengthen yourself to defeat the Vrakhir. But sometimes, in Witcher-like fashion, you must pick between the lesser of several evils. The implementation of the morality challenges is done by presenting you with situations where your own interests are at odds with the benefit of the many, or incorporating layers to the “evil” side so it’s a lot more gray than the average game writing.

Since this is such an important part of the flow of the game, I am very happy that instead of simple choices like determining whether the red or blue faction will help you in the final battle, your options are more nuanced and cascade into further outcomes down the line. For example, during a certain quest, Coen can decide to drink from a magical source to unlock a perk that cannot be gained any other way, let a friend drink to help with their own problems, or destroy the magical source altogether because its power is a result of human sacrifices. The impact of these choices on players will vary from one person to another, as most of the time, the results of your choices cannot be felt immediately in the game world but influence how you want Coen to act as a character.

Another strength of the dialogue choices in the game is that it allows you the freedom to roleplay Coen as a mean person who doesn’t consider anything about the other people at all apart from his own agenda, or a completely altruistic person who puts the greater good above himself, or somewhere in between. Since there is no reputation tied to your choices that will lock you out of certain dialogue options, you can make the choice that you feel fitting in the moment. As a result, you are not forced to either be the “good person” or the “bad person” and makes Coen feel more like an actual free entity with conflicting choices but also, it allows you to make “out of character” decisions in the spur of the moment such as refusing to take human lives just to feed your hunger for the majority of game and at one point, you can just make the decision to drain the blood of someone simply because you feel like it. This gave me a great feeling of agency, and it was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game.

In addition to dialogue choices, Coen can also pick to approach specific situations in multiple ways, such as talking your way through outposts to gain information or simply fighting your way through all the guards. I should note for the manic homicidal among the audience that although you can kill some of the NPCs and cut down some innocent villagers and bystanders, there isn’t complete freedom where you can kill everybody present on the map. Your attacks won’t even hit some important characters, as they are crucial to the story and they need to be present to ensure the storyline plays out.

There are some hiccups with the implementation of your freedom. For example, some reactions or dialogues during quests are predetermined and written in a set way, and there can be instances where Coen acts as if he already has the information related to a certain place or character, but he’s actually experiencing them for the first time during your playthrough. This is a giveaway that there is an “intended pathway” for the main story to follow, but players are not restricted to follow that pathway and can experience the world in an order of their own choosing, which can create some small dissonance.

Like other narrative-driven RPGs, The Blood of Dawnwalker also has multiple different endings based on the many choices you’ve made along the way. As with many other RPGs before, there are a few different main endings with many different resolutions for the various characters and stories that Coen encountered, and the outcome is affected based on the choices made on his mission to free his family from the clutches of the Vrakhir.

Time Mechanic

A rather unique aspect of the game is that The Blood of Dawnwalker uses a time mechanic, and it is intrinsically tied to everything you do. This time mechanic acts as “pressure” for your character, as you only have a limited amount of time before your family dies, and many of your activities and actions consume time, forcing you to make choices on how to best approach your playthrough. Each day and night has eight segments of time each. There’s no timer ticking down, but your actions spend time, consuming it as a resource.

This is a very interesting idea on paper that adds another layer of decision-making on top of the gameplay, but in execution it has some distinct flaws. For example, in addition to the quests and activities, spending perk points and unlocking new skills will also cost you precious time.

So regardless of how slow or how fast you finish a quest or an activity, it will still cost the same amount of in-game time and since learning skills and perks will also cost you “time segments”, I ended up rationing my time resource by limiting the number of times I upgraded my character and ignoring activities that are not directly related to the story in fear of the possibility of missing out on story elements.

While this makes sense in the context of the narrative and to make the players feel the weight of the decisions along with Coen, whether to focus on gaining more power and better loot or emphasize on saving the family, it feels limiting in terms of pure gameplay and will endlessly annoy completionists. Personally, it doesn’t leave a good feeling when you have to decide to intentionally ignore an activity that you’ve stumbled across while exploring an open world game, not because the activity in question is not fun or bad but because you are worried that it might prevent you from experiencing other parts of the game. One can argue that making these decisions is part of this experience, but this doesn’t take away from the fact that it removes part of the fun of exploring an open world game.

Combat

The combat of Blood of Dawnwalker is simple and effective, featuring directional swordplay for attacking or blocking that is intermingled with various sword skills and abilities. The simplicity comes from the controls: there is a single attack button, a block button, and a dodge button that are then supported by casting up to 4 ability and skill slots.

While the directional input for both attack and defense adds a layer to combat, giving you the opportunity to perform perfect blocks by blocking in the correct direction at the last possible moment or guaranteed critical strikes by executing a riposte in an indicated direction with your attack, it becomes repetitive quite early on. Even though you can switch between the sword and claws during nighttime, your moveset stays the same, and you are basically doing the same thing in every combat encounter. Of course, the ability to use different witchcraft during the day and vampirism skills during the night adds variation to the combat, but the core of your approach stays more or less the same during your entire playthrough.

I played the majority of my playthrough on fair difficulty, which has a directional indicator for blocking when an enemy is attacking, and I just ended up focusing on an arrow instead of what the enemy is doing, making it feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over again. The overall experience changed for the better when I raised the difficulty level and turned off the direction indicator, forcing me to pay attention to what the enemies are actually doing, such as whether they are swinging their weapon from the left, right, up, or down, to react accordingly, making combat immensely more enjoyable for me.

While the combat difficulty and experience can be adjusted based on your preferences, it doesn’t change the fact that the game suffers from a noticeable lack of enemy variety. It presents you with different-looking enemies to engage with, but it doesn’t feel great when an enemy wielding a sword, regardless of whether they are a bandit, a soldier, a specter or an undead warrior, all use the same moveset and attacks. As a result, even though what you are seeing on screen looks different, it feels like you are fighting against the same enemy type throughout the game.

The final point for combat is the often hotly debated enemy scaling mechanic available in many games. The lowest level enemies scale along with your level so that it does not feel like you are overpowered at any point during the playthrough. Even at high levels, when you are using various skills and multiple passives, you will not be cutting down any soldiers with a single swing of your sword or a single swipe of your claws, making it feel like you’re not really growing any more powerful compared to when you started out. This is a double-edged sword, as it does keep the challenge up, but it can also feel unrewarding.

A point to note is that there is no stealth system in the game, and you can either avoid enemies or face them head-on, but you cannot pick them off one by one from the shadows.

Exploration

Exploration plays a crucial role in any open world game, and The Blood of Dawnwalker does a good job of making it interesting for players. The world hides a significant variety of places to discover, ranging from ancient tombs to prisons, but you also discover side quests and story elements simply by venturing forth.

While the whole world opens up and is accessible after the prologue, there is a path the game expects you to take, which is determined by the level of enemies in a particular region. This means that even though you can go to a high-level region from the beginning of the game, you will have a hard time, and even the simplest of enemies, such as boars, can take you down with a single hit. This is common for many open-world games, and with a narrative-driven game, it is probably more of a mechanic to encourage you to experience the story in a more linear manner.

Design, Audiovisual and PerformanceVisuals

Regarding the visual design, The Blood of Dawnwalker perfectly captures the dark medieval feel with heavy inspiration from European Landscapes. While the game is set in a fictional valley, it depicts a Bohemian landscape with lush, dark forests, wooden settlements and monasteries, along with Gothic Cathedrals and Castles. There are fantastical elements such as monsters and witchcraft, but the designs are not overly romanticized and fit well with the folklore of the time period. Everything in the universe is coherent and fits the aesthetics of the universe, delivering a faithful rendition of the narrative intent.

Audio

Audio quality is a very important factor in story-driven games, and I am happy to report that the voice acting is absolutely brilliant. Will De Renzy-Martin does a fantastic job as Coen, and is definitely one to keep an eye on in the future. You can feel and hear the emotions of the characters coming through their dialogue. While the music was a bit disappointing given my incredibly high expectations after games like The Witcher or KCD2, it still delivers a good score that matches the pacing of the game and the story.

Performance

The optimization for The Blood of Dawnwalker is generally good, and I only had a single crash during a 30-hour playthrough. The game ran smoothly on high settings even on a mid-range PC setup using an i5-13400 CPU and a 3080 GPU and stuttered for a few seconds only when going from the inventory menu or the map back to gameplay in the city with a large number of NPCs in the background. Even then, the stutter is only for a few seconds, and then the game keeps a stable 60FPS. On my higher-end rigs, such as my 4090 with an i9, the game ran flawlessly and looked absolutely stunning.

Game Length, Replayability & Price Point

This is a story-driven game, so your mileage will vary depending on whether you want to see the results of the different choices you are able to make throughout your journey to save Coen’s family. Each playthrough will take an average player around 30-35 hours, and if you want to see all the possible consequences and endings of the different decisions Coen can make, you will have to do at least two full playthroughs.

Even with saving before a pivotal point and reloading to see the results of a different decision, the consequences of some decisions are not apparent until the very end, adding narrative-driven replayability. You may also want to make different time-allotment choices, so you can likely expect a second playthrough if you enjoyed your first.

With a price of $69.99 USD, The Blood of Dawnwalker is not a budget game, so considering you can expect 30 hours of enjoyment and maybe another 30 if you’re really committed, the price point decision will come down to how much you are craving a character-driven, story-focused RPG. Players who are looking for open-world exploration or refined combat will likely feel like it’s a stretch.

The Blood of Dawnwalker - Final Thoughts

The Blood of Dawnwalker is one of my most anticipated RPGs of 2026; it was my favorite game at Gamescom 2025, and I have been eagerly looking forward to it since then. This, of course, means that I started the game with a set of expectations for what this studio would deliver given their past work and my previous interactions with the previews.

I am glad to report that the game met my expectations in terms of characters and narrative, but I was left somewhat disappointed with the combat and the pressure that the time mechanic put on my approach to exploration.

Overall, I feel this is an excellent first title for Rebel Wolves that sets the stage for the studio to grow and improve with future productions. The Blood of Dawnwalker won’t push the genre to new heights and may not be the powerhouse game that some may have expected, but I think it will be the first of many excellent titles from a brand new studio that has a ton of experience in this genre, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what they do next!