Vampire fiction has spent the better part of a century asking what it costs to live forever. Nighthawks, the sprawling new role-playing adventure from Wadjet Eye Games, is more interested in a different question: what do you do with the rest of your death?
Launching September 22 on Steam and GOG for PC, Mac and Linux, Nighthawks drops players into the role of a vampire six months into their new, unlife, freshly arrived in the one city on the continent that has publicly promised the undead a second chance. That promise, unsurprisingly, does not extend very far past the city limits sign. Suspicion runs thick on the neon-lit streets, and the player is left to decide, issue by issue, night by night, whether the world of vampires and humans is heading toward an uneasy peace or an entirely new age of fear.
Developer Richard Cobbett, whose writing credits include Failbetter Games’ Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, has built a script running past 800,000 words, spanning two years of in-fiction time and populated by more than eighty fully voiced characters. Players will juggle predatory instinct against self-control, wielding vampiric abilities such as Mesmerism, for bending the will of the living; Natural Dominion, for commanding animals; and Tenebrous Form, for dissolving into smoke to slip past a threat entirely. Whether the player claws upward toward influence and power, or simply tries to get by unnoticed, is left entirely in their hands.
Visually, the game pairs Cobbett’s writing with artwork from Ben Chandler, known for his work on Old Skies and Unavowed, while the whole production is helmed by Wadjet Eye founder Dave Gilbert as producer. The studio built Nighthawks in the Godot engine, scripting its enormous branching narrative with the ink dialogue system, a combination increasingly favoured by narrative-heavy independent studios looking to marry mechanical flexibility with sheer volume of prose.
The game’s roots go back to crowdfunding: nearly 4,000 backers pledged nowhere near a small sum, over $136,000, on Kickstarter to help get Nighthawks off the ground, a vote of confidence from a fanbase clearly hungry for vampire fiction that leans as much on humour and hope as it does on horror. That balance is very much the point. Nighthawks promises plenty of gothic dread along the way, but its pitch is fundamentally optimistic: that even a predator, even someone who has already died once, might still choose who to become next.
Nighthawks releases September 22, 2026 on Steam and GOG.
