The Blood of Dawnwalker review roundup: a bold Witcher-adjacent RPG that mostly delivers

Rebel Wolves' debut RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker launched September 3, 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, published by Bandai Namco. The studio — founded by CD Projekt Red veterans including director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz — has made something that wears its influences openly but still carves out a distinct identity.

The game casts you as Coen, a young man in 1347 Carpathian Eastern Europe who is partially turned into a vampire. Because the transformation never completes, he remains a Dawnwalker: human by day, vampire by night, with the shift happening automatically. That duality drives both exploration and combat. Daytime Coen moves on foot like anyone else; nighttime Coen can scale walls, teleport across rooftops, and hunt from above — especially vivid in the central city of Svartrau, where densely packed rooftops become a second playground. The game's other defining mechanic is a 30-day countdown: time advances not passively but through your actions, with each activity costing day or night slots. Rescuing your family from a vampiric court is the goal, and you can spend those 30 days leveling up, forging alliances, or hunting down the court's other three members to tip the odds in the final fight. Game Informer notes the pressure is genuinely effective early — one optional quest about a stolen necklace and a grieving mother lands harder than most fetch quests — but erodes toward the end, with multiple routes to the finale appearing in quick succession and deflating the urgency.

The Witcher 3 comparisons are unavoidable and both outlets lean into them. The dialogue structure, quest tone, UI, folk-inflected soundtrack, and the earthy brutality of the world all echo Geralt's adventure closely enough that veterans will feel the déjà vu immediately. Eurogamer argues Dawnwalker meets that high bar without quite raising it, calling it mostly, enormously successful; Game Informer is more measured, pointing to combat that is conceptually interesting but falls short in execution, and a vampirism system that ends up feeling frictionless rather than threatening. Still, both agree the time mechanic and the day/night duality are genuinely fresh ideas in a genre that tends toward excess.

For a debut studio, landing in the same conversation as one of the most acclaimed RPGs of the last decade is no small thing. Whether the uneven back half and familiar scaffolding hold it back from classic status will likely depend on how much players value the moments where the new ideas click — and there are enough of those to make The Blood of Dawnwalker worth the 30 days it asks for.