There’s so much I like about The Blood of Dawnwalker. It turned my head earlier in the summer when a debut gameplay trailer was released, and my head is still firmly turned – spun like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist – now that I’ve watched a gamescom presentation for it. It’s part Witcher, part Vampire, part Kingdom Come, and if the modest Polish team can deliver what it’s promising, The Blood of Dawnwalker could be great.
The Blood of DawnwalkerDeveloper: Rebel WolvesPublisher: Bandai NamcoAvailability: Releases 2026 on PC (Steam), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X
Quick recap: The Blood of Dawnwalker is the debut game by Rebel Wolves, a studio co-created by Witcher 3 game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, and fitted out with a number of former CD Projekt Red colleagues, including his brother Mateusz, the lead quest designer of The Witcher 3, Jakub Szalamek, one of the lead writers on The Witcher 3, and many others. LinkedIn counts 134 people there, which makes it a sizable operation already. The similarities to The Witcher 3 are not unexpected, then, and you only need to see the game in action for a few moments to appreciate why.
Again, we are a ponytailed warrior exploring a fantastical but grounded fuedal medieval land, one populated by worn down peasants who cuss and complain as they pass you by. Again, we mutter to ourselves as we explore, and we often solve situations with a longsword wielded in two hands, dispatching groups of bandits and guards and whoever stands in our way. But also like The Witcher, there are supernatural forces at play – darker things lurking underneath the facade of the region we explore – and once again we are a supernaturally capable hero capable of taking them on. So much is familiar: the tone of the game, the way it plays, the sensibilities that underpin it. But there are important differences too.
In The Blood of Dawnwalker we’re a vampire, but a vampire with a difference. We’re a Dawnwalker, which is to say, we’re a hybrid – part-vampire, part-human, a bit like Blade in Marvel’s comics. This allows us to do things like, as the name suggests, walk in the sunlight. But our hybrid nature is also tied to the time of day. Put simply, in the day we’re a human capable of mostly human things, whereas at night, we’re a vampire capable of vampire things, and the entire game is built around this idea, this duality. Situations can be solved differently at night than they can in the day.