Rebel Wolves, the Warsaw studio founded four years ago by veterans of CD Projekt Red, released its debut game on Thursday: a dark-fantasy vampire RPG called The Blood of Dawnwalker. It launched on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S to some of the strongest reviews of any original RPG this year, even as players flagged rough performance at launch.
Half-human, half-vampire, all on the clock
The game casts players as Coen, a "Dawnwalker" — human by day, vampire by night — in the fictional 14th-century kingdom of Vale Sangora, a setting drawn from Hungarian and Romanian folklore. A plague has let the vampire lord Brencis seize power by offering a blood-borne "cure" in exchange for monthly tithes of the weak. When Brencis's men kidnap Coen's family for a ritual sacrifice, Coen has 30 in-game days to save them, a hard deadline that governs nearly every choice in the open world.
At night, Coen can scale walls, blink across rooftops and feed on enemies for temporary power; by day, combat relies on a directional-blocking system layered with a hex-magic tree built out over what the studio estimates is a 50-to-70-hour campaign. Four difficulty settings are available, and Rebel Wolves describes the structure as a "narrative sandbox" whose consequences ripple forward rather than a fixed main quest.
That day-count structure was the game's biggest gamble, and critics generally judged it a success. Video Games Chronicle gave the game 4 out of 5, writing:
By pitching an RPG that's full of intrigue and intricate storytelling, but setting it in a small (by today's standards) open world, it shines as an example of the genre that doesn't go big for the sake of it.
Video Games Chronicle
Aggregate scores landed in a similar band. Metacritic listed the PC version at 84, the PlayStation 5 version at 83 and the Xbox Series X/S version at 88, while OpenCritic put roughly nine in ten critics recommending it. Reviewers praised the writing, the weight given to Coen's choices and combat that punishes button-mashing. The most common complaints centered on frame-rate stutters and visual pop-in at launch, plus a sense that some of the time-management systems are not as developed as the premise promises.
A studio built to be smaller
Rebel Wolves was founded in February 2022 by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, who directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and ran production on Cyberpunk 2077 before leaving CD Projekt Red in 2021. He has said he wanted to build tightly scoped projects after years on sprawling productions; the studio has since grown to roughly 160 people, with his brother Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz serving as creative director and Witcher 3 co-writer Jakub Szamałek as narrative director. Bandai Namco is publishing the game, which Rebel Wolves has billed as the opening chapter of a planned saga spanning different eras of the same world, with each future installment meant to stand as a self-contained story rather than a cliffhanger sequel. Tomaszkiewicz was one of eight CD Projekt Red departures who seeded the studio in its earliest days; it has since built out its own composing team, with three credited composers scoring the game's Carpathian-inflected soundtrack.
The launch caps roughly four years of development conducted largely outside the spotlight that follows CD Projekt Red's own output, and it lands in a crowded fall RPG calendar. Bandai Namco and Rebel Wolves have not disclosed early sales figures. The studio has said stability patches addressing the performance complaints are already in progress, though it has not given a firm timeline. Whether critical goodwill converts into a lasting playerbase, and into demand for the sequels Rebel Wolves is already planning, should become clearer as reviews from a broader run of players accumulate over the coming weeks. For a studio whose founders spent years building one of the most successful RPGs of the last decade, the early verdict suggests they have not lost the thread — even if the machinery running it still needs work.
