Still so excited to see this finished. 🤩 Thank you again!

Also, shoutout to @crushingeagle.bsky.social for introducing me to your art way back when on the other website.🙏

This is not counting primarily card-based games as board games.

If mostly card-based games are included, Gloom and Legend of the Five Rings (FFG) are in, while BloodBowl and Terraforming Mars are out to make space for them.

Unranked except for my number 1:

1.) Nemesis

BloodBowl
Chess
Dead of Winter
Dixit
Eldritch Horror
Kingdom Death: Monster
Mechs vs. Minions
Scotland Yard
Terraforming Mars

There is very little that works fully as intended here, but strangely despite the laundry list of issues, also not much to truly upset me. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

Maybe a 4/10? Still uncertain.

And as for my personal Number One nitpick: Just like it's predecessor, the game plays fast and loose with the lore about vampire decay upon death, which sadly this time affects one of the main plot twists.

Unfortunate, but no one unfamiliar with the TTRPGs will notice.

I do have a bit of praise, mostly for some of the foreshadowing of the main villain, and some of the character writing. In particular, the flashbacks with Fabien were fun to read (though their linearity and tendecy to use delaying sub-quests often made them feel like a chore).

As for the main quest, responses in dialogue are limited, but I never felt too hamstrung by it. What is frustrating, however, is that unless the game tells you you are lying, you are not lying with your choices, and the game will take them at face value.

The NPCs outside of the main plot barely deserve the name, and feel more like a collection of bullet points than characters.

The gathering of blood resonance to unlock cross-clan powers is frustrating at best and dull at worst, once you acquire the powers that trivialise it.

The game looks fine, the bright colours and lighting standing out, but the outsides blend together due to a heavy use of fog.

But that's just as well since there is no reason to explore. The world feels empty.

Side content, barely there to begin with, is bland and copy-paste.

Didn't run into many major bugs, but I had one outright crash, and one time where an interactible prompt wouldn't show properly, forcing a reload. The latter is exacerbated by being beholden to auto-save only, though one quickly figures out how to brute-force the game to save.

On mouse and keyboard, combat feels floaty and erratic, which is a problem, as combat, running from A to B, and talking is the only gameplay there is.

The game is also riddled with minor technical issues, such as microstuttering, glitching visuals, and especially audio bugs.

I mean that I had no idea that the first end is always the same. The ending screen that tells only shows up after beating it once.

But the game telegraphs the "default end" condition clearly, so I already steered clear of it on my initial playthrough, thinking it would matter.

Agreed. Key items not taking up inventory space makes any "optimisation" optional anyway.

Plus, on default difficulty I never ran out of items, even already doing the NG+ condition on a hunch. So with hindsight I could have just thrown tons of health items out to make space.

That sounds promising!

Can't wait to give the game a try hopefully this weekend.

To steal an old xkcd joke:

Finally, a nice, round birthday!

Well, Berlin definitely is one of the German cities of all time.

Wish we could have stuck to Frankfurt, but at least it's nice to see we're keeping up the UK>Germany>France rotation.