Cabernet, a wonderfully dark yet enticing vampire game.
Cabernet is a 2D simulation game set in a fictional 19th-century Eastern European town with a modern twist. You’ll have to guide Liza, a young vampire struggling to balance her morality with the new world she has been pulled into. The game was developed by the Party for Introverts.
The studio is a two-person team that has developed several critically acclaimed short, interactive stories, such as Thing-in-Itself and A Lozenge. Akupura Games is an American video game publisher and developer based in Los Angeles, California. The company is known for games like Universe For Sale and Ghostwire: Tokyo—Prelude.
Cabernet begins with a funeral, beautiful artwork, and great voice acting to lay the scene for choosing the starting stats for your playthrough. The funeral is Liza’s. After picking up her base stat, there is a cutscene that transitions from the funeral to Liza waking up in a dark dungeon. When Liza wakes, she’s very obviously confused and disorientated. Liza can walk around the room she finds herself in and interact with a few of the objects. One of the items she can pick up is her journal.
In her journal, she has a few tabs to keep track of varying things that happen in the game. One of the most important is the Character Sheet; as you complete quests and tasks, you earn experience points that level up your vampire rank. You only have four skills to add skill points to.
Each skill will be used for skill checks, and these checks can grant more experience points and open dialogue options or even increase relationship points with characters. The Skills you have in the game are Music & Arts, Literature & Writing, Science & Logic, and finally, History & Politics. You can also level these skills by doing tasks such as reading a book.
However, tasks take time to do, and you don’t have a lot of moonlight to work with. The day is split into four sections: Dusk, Midnight, Twilight, and Sunrise, although you only have three action points to work within a day. Once an action point is used, it moves on to the next section of the day, such as moving from dusk to midnight.
You’ll need to manage your action points in order to do a variety of things in Cabernet, from doing tasks for your Sire to even helping Liza find romance. Relationships are an important part of Cabernet, especially if you want to feed on humans rather than wildlife. The different characters have their personality, and that means different likes, dislikes, and interests, so you’ll have to keep this in mind when picking dialogue options.
In the Journal, there is a quest tab. You can pick up a variety of quests, from side quests and, obviously, the main quest to quests tailored to characters. These quests allow you to get closer to characters and improve your relationship with them while getting to know their personalities.
Another important mechanic is Morality, which you can keep track of in the Character Sheet tab of the Journal. Morality is split into two scores: Humanity and Nihilism. You gain either for decisions you make, and you’ll need them in order to unlock dialogue actions further on. One of the ways to gain Nihilism is to steal. While that sounds easy, it is not as easy as being a vampire when you can’t let humans know what you are. This is where abilities come into play.
You have four abilities as a Vampire. One is to transform into a bat, allowing you to fly around the town you found yourself in. Your second ability is the ability to take on your true vampiric form, fangs and all. Your third ability is invisibility, although this doesn’t last forever. Your final ability is to enchant.t, Liza will sing a sweet lullaby for someone, and if she has a good standing with them, it will take. Unfortunately, all these abilities slowly increase your hunger bar.
Hunger is easily solved when relationships are high enough; you can enchant a human in order to feed on them and alter their mind within reason if you are given the option to do so. If Liza drinks too much blood, however, or she drains a human dry, then she becomes intoxicated with blood. While this increases power, according to the lore in the game, it is also addictive.
While playing Cabernet, you can come across various mini-games that spice up the dialogue, such as picking mushrooms or learning to play piano from Anastasia. The mini-game outcomes can also change what a character says to you afterward when the game is done, such as Anastasia praising you for getting a perfect score on the piano piece.
Cabernet features a storybook-illustrative art style that ties into the game’s theme and really brings the world and people to life despite being 3D. The visual effects and graphics make it feel as if you are reading an old storybook in a good way. It makes it fun to explore the town in its semi-open world appearance.
The voice acting for Cabernet is done extremely well. All the characters are lively, and the actors’ voices bring to life their emotions and personalities. Although there are some issues with side characters, for example, Faina, whose voice actor delivers a performance on par with the rest of the cast, there are issues with the mixing and mastering of her audio during certain dialogue, such as mic peaking and volume issues. Other than that, you should have a wonderful time experiencing the stories.
The two voice actors that players will be surprised to hear would be Shogo Miyakita, who has done voice acting work in the past but is more well known for acting in audio stories like The Death and Life of River Song from the Last Words Audio Story. The other voice actor is the famous internet personality Brian David Gilbert, who has done voice-over work such as Freddy Frederson from Duck Detective: The Secret Salami.
The audio design for Cabernet is incredibly diverse, with both the music and ambient sound helping to set the scenes and mood of the game. Most notably, much of the music was composed by renowned composer Jim Fowler, who composed music for not only video games like Bloodborne but also TV series and live music. However, he wasn’t the only music composer; Elena Alekseeva has also worked with Party for Introverts before.
Overall, Cabernet is a fantastic narrative game that allows you just to sit back and enjoy the story, especially on a rainy day. While there are a lot of mechanics to learn, along with a time crunch, it can seem overwhelming at times. The game features an exceptionally well-written story and voiced characters, which make pushing through that grind worth it. It is a really great game for fans of visual novels and those who really enjoy narrative RPGs.
