Code Vein’s Fantasy of Knowing
Bandai Namco’s new Souls-like offers a sincere look at vampiric traumas.
Code Vein is a game that was made for me, specifically. It’s about vampires, it’s about community, it’s about trauma and healing and memory. It’s only missing time travel! I have not had as good a time discovering a game in a long time. The first moment I realized just how much this game was playing to my specific interests was the aftermath of the first boss fight.
In Code Vein, vampires who fall too deep into bloodlust or die and reincarnate too many times risk losing pieces of their memories. At a certain threshold they are known as Lost, and are so far gone that they no longer have any sense of self. Your first partner falls victim to the thirst and becomes Lost, and you must fight him. It’s not a permanent end; due to the nature of vampires and Lost, death is just a momentary setback. But, for a moment, you can offer peace to what once was your friend. At the site of his death, you find a Vestige; a crystallized memory. By holding it, you are taken into a dreamscape where the soul of the person who died is laid bare while somber and tragic pianos tug you along a path.
It is a taste of what is to come. As the game progresses you find more and more Vestiges, some containing memories lost by your companions. By discovering the Vestiges, found in places where a vampire or Lost has died, you bring context and meaning back to the minds of your friends. Not all of them recognize just how much damage they have been subjected to by war and abuse, because it is in the nature of these traumas to burrow deep inside us and hide from the light of day. But by repairing the Vestiges and confronting these past tragedies, the characters around you grow and accept their pasts, and this gives them the conviction to forge their futures. You mend wounds, you rehabilitate relationships, and you remind them of what they’ve lost and why they have to keep fighting.
Through Vestiges, Code Vein also provides a fantasy of knowing by revealing to the characters the missing contexts of their lost loved ones’ lives. It presents a world where you can know that your partner’s last thoughts were about you, you can hear them speak of their dreams as they die. It is a powerful fantasy to be able to see love when it is hidden from the world, to peer through this fragile window into a heart.
Code Vein is a beautiful game, and I haven’t even mentioned how fun it is to play from moment to moment. Switching from one build to a totally different one on the fly is an exultation, especially in this gamespace. It’s the only time the narrative justification for a character creator has resonated with me in the gameplay; I truly do feel like a cosmic wild card.
It’s certainly not perfect; it has its fair share of frustrating moments, and there is a pervasive feeling of fragility that stayed fairly consistent as the game progressed. The latter actually points to a pretty well balanced difficulty curve, but it annoyed me on occasion because I was barely keeping pace with the specific skill level I have cultivated with these games over the past decade. The moment where my skill and the game’s difficulty met perfectly was the first battle with the Queen’s Knight boss; everything on the other side of that encounter felt like it was slowly slipping out of my grasp.
I love this game dearly, and I hope you don’t overlook it as the annual rush of autumn releases crashes down on you. This one is really worth your time.
