There’s an ill wind howling through the valley — and no, it isn’t just the plague ravaging 14th-century Eastern Europe. A family of vampires has taken over the quiet stretch between the Carpathian Mountains that you call home, and they’ve made you one of their gifted thralls. Now it’s up to you, a peasant given the powers of the blood-draining undead, to save your family, and perhaps the valley itself.

At a preview event in Los Angeles, California, I got an early hands-off look at Blood of the Dawnwalker, the upcoming action RPG due out in 2026 from Polish studio Rebel Wolves and published by Bandai Namco. While I didn’t play the game, I watched a lengthy presentation shown to a group of media members as a developer played a live build, walking us through the various cycles and mechanics that players will navigate in their quest to save the valley. 

But in conversation with two of the game’s developers, I heard that Blood of the Dawnwalker has an uncommon feature — one that’s perhaps best known from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. From the beginning of the game, you can march up to the game’s end boss, the vampire Francis, and try to defeat them. 

“We have this narrative sandbox and our goal here is to tell the players, alright, you’re out of the prologue — you do you. If you want to go and storm Brencis’ Castle right here right now, go,” said Piotr Kucharski, writer at Rebel Wolves. “In fact, we invite it, right? We want to see those people on YouTube.”

That prologue sets the stage for the game: Protagonist Coen’s sister is infected with the Black Plague. She’s nearly killed by religious zealots but for the timely intervention of Brencis’ coven of vampires, who turn her into one of them. Their attempt to turn Coen fails, turning him into an empowered half-vampire. He has 30 days to save his family — but players can go about saving them in any way they choose. Each major action takes precious time, but players can choose to progress as they want. This means it’s possible to miss a ton of events and quests in the game. 

Play by day or night — the choice is yours

The demo started at the gameplay overview, embedded above, but extended much further. The game’s developers walked us through a fork in the road in a quest for a magic sword. By day, as a mere human, Coen worked his way through church bureaucracy by hunting down a wayward caretaker who turned into a monster in a quarantined almshouse. He finally got access to a book in the church library, which identified which sigil to look out for in the graveyard. The sword, it turns out, was sequestered in a tomb with its bearer.

Daytime activity can involve swordplay, including use of magic-like hexes used in and out of combat, but it’s mostly geared toward investigation. You’ll talk (including to the dead, thanks to a handy Compel Soul hex), read books and get answers. But, as with nighttime, any prolonged activity like a lengthy conversation (indicated on the screen with a special icon, so players won’t be surprised) could take a segment of time, ticking the clock closer to Coen’s end-of-month deadline.

At the halfway point of the demo, the developer went back to show how things could be done differently at night, using Coen’s vampiric powers to shadowstep across rooftops and walk up walls — making it easy to sneak into that library to find the right book. But guards patrolling the graveyard would have to be dealt with to unearth the tomb, giving the developer the chance to show Coen’s undead fighting capabilities (including goring with claws and draining blood). Descending into the tomb, we found the sword, but it was still held by an undead knight imprisoned in the walls — a Dawnwalker like us gone mad by an extended lifetime of hunger and starvation. 

Killing the knight gave us the vaunted sword, which after reforging, would be a powerful weapon when Coen eventually challenges Brencis. But that quest is optional, meaning some players will never find it. There are complications to choosing whether to do some quests during the day and night, too — for instance, it might be easier to sneak around at night, but that Dawnwalker knight would be harder to kill with his own nocturnal vampiric powers.

So, technically, players can choose to play entirely during the day or solely at night if they like one half of Coen’s abilities better than the other. But they’d be missing out. While some quests have both day and night layers, others can only be accessed in daylight or after the sun falls, said Rafał Jankowski, lead quest designer at Rebel Wolves.

“Some quests require Coen to speak to some corpses and similarly, certain places can only be reached with planeshift or shadowstep,” Jankowski said. 

Splitting real-time combat with action RPG mechanics

The slice of combat we saw during the demo likewise split between day and night strategies. But most of the fighting will be done with a longsword, relying on rhythmically alternating between defense and offense. When enemies come at you swinging their own blades, directional indicators will pop up, requiring you to block in one of the four cardinal directions before counterattacking yourself.

When Rebel Wolves revealed Blood of the Dawnwalker’s combat in gameplay reveal videos, fans in the comments critiqued the potential difficulty of predicting directions to block. So the studio took that as feedback and came up with a solution to add another omnidirectional blocking ability, but which would drain Coen’s stamina in exchange. Likewise, when viewers complained the camera followed the player too closely, developers added a zoomed-out option.

“I do believe that we are still at the stage of development when it’s invaluable to get people involved more in the production, to hear their opinions on the project. We will keep our ear close to the ground,” Jankowski said. 

Otherwise, Blood of the Dawnwalker follows some expected action RPG standbys, with equippable weapons and armor, healing items and upgradeable skills. The game has a trio of skill trees, split between daytime-only, nighttime-only and shared abilities. 

The influence of Warhammer and The Witcher

Set in the Carpathian Mountains that stretch from modern-day Czech Republic to Romania and during the 14th century, with plenty of period-accurate fashion and architecture, Rebel Wolves’ game seemingly vibes with the more realistic Kingdom Come: Deliverance (set in modern-day Czech Republic). But a bigger inspiration, the developers told me, is Warhammer, the dark fantasy tabletop game about warring armies of men, elves, dwarves and monstrous creatures.

“I like the idea of a society, a medieval society that has a city, a thriving community but there is also this outside danger. You have Chaos, you have Skavens, you have all kinds of creatures, Orcs and so on,” Kucharski said. “Here [in Blood of the Dawnwalker], we have a bit of a different situation, because all those creatures come out into the light and they say, OK, we are going to rule you.”

With its corruption of Christian churches into incorporating seeming blood rituals as a vampiric touch, Blood of the Dawnwalker sure takes cues from Warhammer’s dark medieval vibe. But Kucharski also mentioned the tabletop RPG Vampire: The Masquerade (in its medieval variant) as another inspiration, as well as the Dragon Age series for its consequence of choices and system of magic.

But with its third-person sword-and-magic gameplay, supernatural monsters and vaguely Slavic setting, Blood of the Dawnwalker reminded me a lot more of another popular game from a Polish studio: The Witcher 3.

It’s a comparison that the developers have been getting a lot. Jankowski is quick to point out the different natures of both games’ protagonists, especially with Coen’s day-and-night cycles of human and vampiric ability. But more importantly, Kucharski noted how much history Geralt already has in the games, sourced from the popular series of Witcher novels — he’s the Butcher of Blavikan with his own reputation, whereas Coen is just some guy. 

Of course, Coen will build his reputation as the game progresses in its zero-to-hero narrative, Kucharski said. And perhaps there’s more to his saga after Blood of the Dawnwalker ends, too — but the developers were coy about what plans they had coming for Coen.

“We hope that we’ll see some other adventures going maybe in the future,” Kucharski said. “Now we are focusing on the first one — just to get it right.”