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Unless I’ve forgotten a chapter in Dracula where he collects crafting material to upgrade his pants.
I remember my first night in Minecraft, hiding in a hole I’d dug in the ground, waiting for the sun to come up while zombies mumbled and grumbled outside. V Rising reverses that. I spend my days in the dark, then come out at night to hunt. Emerging from my lair, I transform into a wolf and search the land for veins to tap: veins of rich copper ore.
As a survival game it was inevitable V Rising would have you chop down an unsustainable number of trees. Which I did, with twin axes I made from scavenged bones. I also had a mace made of bone for clubbing menhirs into stone or ore, and a sword made of bone for attacking anything that could fight back. But it took a lot of copper ore, transformed into ingots via the furnace back at my castle, to push my solo civilization out of the Bone Age.
Since V Rising is played top-down, construction is all about clearing ground and snapping things onto a grid. It makes building less janky than it tends to be in survival games where your perspective is closer to the ground and you can see the seams, but it also feels less creative. There’s no way to put anything on top of anything else, meaning my castle is doomed to remain flat rather than reaching for the sky with towers like clawed fingers yearning to tear out God’s heart. What I’ve made is the opposite of gothic. It’s practical.
The first few times I got caught out by sunrise were tense experiences. You’re fine in the shade, but spend more than a couple of seconds out of it and you smolder, then go up like flash paper. As the sun moves, so do the shadows, which I assume every player learns the hard way by bringing up the map screen while safely positioned next to a tree then closing it to find they’re on fire.
There’s always the temptation to start chopping as well. You’re in a copse or a grove or whatever the word is for a thing too small to be a forest, surrounded by wood that could be turned into planks back at Castle Practical. If you’re careful about it, just taking out this tree and that tree, then you won’t catch fire. Until the sun moves, of course. Remember how the sun moves?
To its credit, V Rising makes you explore to collect certain materials before you unlock the ability to make them at home. So you pull up the map, mouse over the yellow circles noting bandit camps and the like, and find one with the goods you need. Taking bandits’ blood is secondary to taking their leather until the tannery unlocks. If they’ve got paper I’ll have that too, for the research desk. It’s a constant push to get out there and fight things, like the bosses whose special blood unlocks more building upgrades and new powers.
Combat’s the good bit, as you’d expect from the studio who made Battlerite, with plenty of abilities and enemies to try them on. I can make corpses explode out of the ground or throw a frost bat to freeze people, and switch between a crossbow, sword, and spear as the situation demands. Some enemies have shields that incapacitate if you strike while they’re blocking, or throw nets or explosives. And some of them are bears, like the one who blundered into my castle one morning because I’d left the door open.
I fought one boss in a mine, a foreman who took so long to put down the sun was practically up by the end of it. Which was fine, I figured. I’m underground, and there’s a lot of copper down here to keep me busy. Then the rooster crowed and the sun rose, and the boss respawned with it. V Rising is designed for multiplayer, so bosses can’t stay dead—that would deny other players the chance to kill them and take their precious upgrades. But knowing that everyone I kill comes back does take something away. That’s supposed to be my schtick, surely. Respawning is what vampires are all about.
Most of the time so far, I haven’t felt like a vampire in V Rising. I’m doing things I should probably have servants for. Which I can get, once I finish gathering more unsullied hearts to put in the blood press and turn into greater blood essence so I can make a Servant Coffin. Hopefully that’ll give me what I need, an Igor or a Renfield to gather the basic stuff while I plan the next hunt, or map out an extension to my lair. Someone to bring all the ore, animal skins, and plant fibre to me while I lurk in the dark, compulsively counting the material to make sure I’ve got enough like the classic vampire I yearn to be: the Count from Sesame Street. «Vun! Vun copper ingot! Ah, ah, ah!»
Read more: V Rising is more than Valheim with vampires
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He’s written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was published in 2015, he edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and actually did play every Warhammer videogame.
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