Cabernet review

• Reviews by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Nothing at all sucks about this narrative role-playing adventure that masterfully brings to light the humanity of vampires

The vampire: an iconic monster that exists as a staple in our modern cultural consciousness. Across all forms of media, there are countless interpretations of these legendary creatures of the night. But why is it that we find ourselves captivated by a being that has pervaded for so long throughout history? Along with werewolves, ghosts, witches, and other supernatural entities, we are fascinated with these creatures because of their reflection on humanity. While there are many variations on exactly what it means to be a werewolf or a ghost, there is always one constant to vampires across all tellings: their need to drink blood. The superb narrative RPG Cabernet takes this core concept and beautifully crafts a world where the vampiric curse is dissected and studied through the complex relationships you foster or destroy with your victims while you struggle with the nature of your unnatural immortal existence. 

Cabernet begins where most stories would end: at your funeral. It is an unspecified year in the late 19th century, as indicated by your tombstone. You play as Elizaveta Morozova, known to her family and others as Liza, and you have died due to causes unknown. While standing over the freshly dug grave, your uncle and brother speak about your incredible accomplishments in life as a woman breaking into the field of medicine during a time when this was largely considered an impossibility. At this point, you are provided with your own options to describe Liza’s life: Were you gifted in the arts? Maybe you were well versed in various works of literature? Did you have a scientific mind beyond your peers that led to you excelling in your studies? It is here that you begin to craft the Liza that you wanted to be in life, and these memories form the foundation of your stats once you begin your new undeath.

After your family members have finished speaking, the screen darkens and you awaken as Liza in what appears to be a cell in a dark dungeon. There is a bucket crusted with the stains of some sort of reddish liquid that you pray isn’t what you think it is, and there is nothing in the room other than an old bed and a lantern dimly casting light. You’re exhausted and wearing a filthy nightgown, but thankfully your medical journal and family medallion have been set on a nearby table for you to find. Before long you make your way out of the dungeon after promising a favor to a mysterious entity, allowing you to escape the locked cell. You then emerge into an extravagant ballroom filled with pale-skinned, opulently dressed individuals who scoff at Liza’s dirty attire. 

Here you are met by the mysterious Countess Orlova, who is revealed to be the owner of the mansion and the one hosting the gala. She hands you a glass of what you assume to be red wine, but as you drink you feel yourself strangely refreshed. Surely the work of some new miracle elixir! After changing into an extravagant dress given to you by the Countess, and noticing that for some reason the mirror refused to show back your reflection, the fantasy of magic elixirs and funhouse mirrors is shattered by a servant of the Countess known as Hussar, who reveals that you are human no more. You are now a vampire – a member of what is referred to as “Higher Society” by others of your kind – sired by a vampiric doctor to save you from your mortal end under mysterious circumstances. And in order to survive, you are going to have to adapt to this new way of life whether you like it or not. 

To say this game has a strong hook is an understatement. From the moment I saw Liza’s gravestone engraved with various stat values attributed to the choices I was making, I was eager to discover what awaited me in this gothic world of the supernatural. The game’s backgrounds all have a beautiful hand-painted look, from moody lake beds under moonlight to the lively interiors of a small-town tavern. Every character is designed to be reminiscent of a papercraft doll, as if taken straight out of a gothic storybook. It’s a striking aesthetic that makes the world feel uniquely its own, and helps mask some of the limitations in animation with character interactions. The mostly piano-based musical score is similarly incredible, with many tracks evoking a sense of melancholy befitting this world of vampires and monsters.

Cabernet is an entirely narrative-driven role-playing game set in a small Eastern European town, with quests based exclusively on your interactions with the world and its characters instead of slashing through zombies or giant rats. Rather than strength or wisdom, Liza’s stats grant her different options in dialogue that can prove beneficial when speaking with the right individuals. You have four main stat types: Music and Arts, Literature and Writing, Science and Logic, and History and Politics. You choose your base stats during your funeral in the prologue, but you will have numerous opportunities to increase these throughout the game – notably through reading various books or wearing different outfits that can improve different skills depending on their effects when worn. Completing enough quests will increase your rank in vampiric society (leveling up), with the ability to increase your stat pools at these moments as well.

Outside of these four main character modifiers, the decisions you make will align Liza to two very different paths of morality: Humanity and Nihilism. In your new life, you are unbound by the rules of the mortal world. Will you desperately grasp at whatever shreds of humanity you have left, selflessly bettering the people around you who will wither and die even as you live forever? Or will you cast aside your notions of morality and live in the moment, indulging in the riches of undeath that are yours for the taking – these townspeople only a mere lifetime to enjoy their existence while you have eternity, after all! Every character interaction leads to possible swings of the pendulum in one direction or another – some leading towards your Humanity, others leading into a path of Nihilism. There is no right or wrong way to proceed; your Liza’s story is yours alone, and Cabernet provides a tremendous variety of choices that tailor the character you want her to be.

Most of the game’s 14-16 hour runtime will take place in the unnamed town you now call home – unnamed, but by no means without personality. You progress through in-game calendar evenings, sleeping while the sun is up to avoid the pesky incineration caused by its rays meeting your cursed flesh. Your coffin resides at the clinic of your sire, Doctor Volkov. Each evening, you are able to explore the town and converse with the various residents who inhabit it. There are main objectives to complete – usually tasks given to you by the Countess or delicately tiptoeing between a group of revolutionaries and the newly elected town mayor – which typically require completion by a certain calendar date. But the majority of your time in your nightly strolls will be focused on interacting with the natural and supernatural individuals around town and pursuing their various quest lines. 

Each night you are given a total of three Action Points (AP). Certain quests, conversations and maneuvers you perform will cost an AP, and these essentially act as progressions through time. If you read a book to boost one of your skills, this will typically take one AP as it takes time to read. Each AP used will advance the clock further in predetermined increments through the dead of night to the crack of dawn. Once you have used up your three AP for the evening, you will notice small embers begin to fleck off of Liza. This indicates that you need to start heading back to your coffin, as sunrise is imminent and you will cease to exist if you are caught in the open. Unlike during the night, once you start to ember the clock will begin proceeding towards sunrise without Action Points being spent. Thankfully you have ample time to make your way back to safety. The clock will tick slowly, so as long as you aren’t going out of your way to avoid heading home, it is more of a small nudge to progress the story rather than a legitimate threat of death. 

Guiding Liza through the side-scrolling environments on her nightly excursions is relatively simple. You control movement with standard WASD controls on a keyboard, and you can select different options in dialogue with the mouse or E key. (Full gamepad controls are also supported.) When healthy, you can run by holding down Shift. As you progress through the main story, you will begin to gain various vampiric abilities that provide you with new options to interact with the characters and world around you. These are accessed through an ability wheel you can open at any time outside of dialogue with a right-click. The first skill you gain is being able to fly as a bat, and soon after the ability to bust out your fangs to do what vampires do best. There are only four total abilities over the course of the game, and most are only used in specific set piece scenarios. While it would have been nice to see more variety in the abilities at your disposal, along with more opportunities to freely use them, the ones you do receive are sufficient for providing the tools you need.

At its core, Cabernet is about forging and breaking relationships with others while balancing your relentless need to feed. Your health is indicated by a blood chalice at the top left of the screen, and after each night passes the chalice will drain slightly. Once your blood levels fall below halfway, Liza will begin to look paler than usual and you will lose the ability to run (and will fly slower as a bat). In order to keep yourself from running dry, you must feed. You are able to purchase more of the life-giving Cabernet that you had a taste of at the Countess’s mansion, but it is typically expensive and money is scarce. That means seeking real blood. You cannot feed on the dead or undead, but you do have the option to hunt rabbits in the nearby forest if you are desperate. You receive Nihilism points for each rabbit you kill, however – it’s frowned upon to murder sweet woodland creatures, it turns out.

Cabernet

Genre:	Drama
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Historical, Monsters
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Illustrated realism
Gameplay:	RPG, Visual novel, Choices matter
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Long (more than 10 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

Living humans will be your primary food source, but you can only feed on individuals who are enchanted by you or another vampire in order to ensure your affliction is not discovered. (Higher Society would not tolerate the mortal world finding out about their existence.) And there’s another catch: You can only enchant people whom you have a good enough relationship with. If someone hates your guts, there’s no way they can be enchanted. And if they can’t be enchanted, they can’t sate your bloodlust. 

Everyone you meet, vampiric or otherwise, is tracked in a Relationship tab you can access from your character menu. When you respond in conversation with something a person likes, your bond with them will deepen. If you say something that person takes issue with, your relationship will be negatively affected. If you get to a high enough level with a few select characters, you will even have the option to form a romantic connection that can sustain your blood chalice without the need for feeding on anyone else. While you technically only need to enchant and feed on one or two characters to sustain yourself, I found myself drawn into a complex web of character relationships where I wanted to dive into every possible quest line and explore every line of dialogue to see how my mark on the world would change. The richness of the dialogue and the stellar voice cast made each and every character a joy to interact with, whether I loved them or wanted to spite them.

Most individuals you feed from will suffer a major negative hit to their relationship with Liza if you feed on them, though they won’t remember the reason “why” they so dislike you, just that there is something you did to them that was rather unsavory. Romantic partners, on the other hand, are completely fine with you using them as an all-you-can-eat blood bag, as long as you pace yourself in your indulgence. And with good reason. because one of the major risks of feeding on the characters you forge relationships with is the potential for not letting go in time and bleeding them dry. 

When someone has been enchanted, you are provided the option to reveal your vampiric features and hit the action button to feed. A dramatic animation will play out of Liza biting down on their neck, and you will see the character’s blood slowly drain through a meter at the bottom right corner of the screen. You can stop at any time by letting go of the action key, but if you don’t release your victim before their blood is depleted, it can lead to their untimely death. You can try to time it as close to empty as possible on their blood meter, but there is a brief lag from when you release the action button and when Liza actually lets go. 

It is also possible to overfill your health pool with too much blood, if you aren’t careful – doing so will lead Liza to become blood drunk, and the screen will begin to sway slightly. This will also give a massive temporary stat boost to all of your core abilities, but the boost and swaying screen will return to normal the next time you sleep in your coffin. Be warned, however, that each time you become blood drunk your health meter will decrease faster between rests. 

Characters die permanently in Cabernet, and while there are some quests that can lead to their demise without your interference, it is entirely possible to accidentally (or intentionally) overindulge in your bloodthirsty impulses and cause it yourself. In fact, you could conceivably kill multiple major characters and completely alter how some story elements play out. If you change your mind or realize you’ve made an egregious mistake, however, you are able to manually save your progress at the mirror adorning Liza’s bedroom. (The game autosaves periodically as well during particularly long stretches.)

This branching nonlinearity can lead to cracks in the complex web being woven. There was a time in my playthrough when characters proposed a toast to a bartender whom I had unfortunately led to an untimely death the night before, as if he was still standing there. Issues like this are few and far between, thankfully, and the majority of the time a character death would end up dramatically altering dialogue with other characters who had a direct connection with the individual.

By the time you near the end of the game, the necessity for blood will have become essentially trivial. You can acquire a powerful item that lets you replenish your blood with no downside if you complete a specific side quest, and even if you don’t come into possession of this item, by then you will likely have a romantic partner from whom you can consume your fill of blood instead. (If you enter a romantic relationship with a vampiric partner, you will indulge in Cabernet with them rather than drinking their blood.)

If it seems I’ve forgotten about the main storyline – regarding the Countess’s ulterior motives for sending you on various errands, the mysterious favor you promised to an stranger to escape your imprisonment, and the plight of the revolutionaries – it’s because the narrative itself takes back seat for the majority of the game, allowing you to focus in on the individual characters and their motivations for being in your town. While the last quarter of Cabernet brings the central plot back into focus, I would have liked to see it more integrated throughout. I never completely lost interest in it, but nothing could come close to the intrigue of side quests like helping (or hindering) a rusalka straight out of Eastern European folklore from taking revenge on the man who scorned her, or performing open heart surgery on a vampire in order to free them from a cursed contract. There are a huge variety of quests like these that are entirely optional for finishing the game, but I went out of my way to complete as many as I could due to their exceptional quality. 

Speaking of rusalkas, throughout my playthrough I couldn’t shake a strange nostalgia that seemed to come out of nowhere. I found myself consistently feeling the same sense of adventure in a macabre world as I had felt in the fiendishly inventive Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness. Even beyond the presence of domovoi and other folk creatures, I kept experiencing a sense of welcome familiarity between the unnamed town here and the lands of Mordavia. While there is little puzzle solving or humor in the world of Cabernet, it definitely brought a smile to my face when I made the connection.

Final Verdict

Cabernet is an incredible achievement. Your Liza’s story will be unlike anyone else’s, and to manage that while creating a world of memorable characters and moments is an experience all its own. The impressive variety of quests makes for a highly replayable adventure as well. As much as I tried to uncover my first time through, I still barely scratched the surface with some of the characters I met. With complex themes like blood consumption being a reflection of alcoholism, the immense weight of living forever, and trying to retain any sense of humanity when you are factually a monster, there are some incredibly heavy topics explored here, but they are treated with the respect and gravity necessary to tell a story that has something of value to say about them. Being a creature of the night may not always be easy, but the rewards are well worth indulging in a sip or two of Cabernet when offered.

Sam played Cabernet on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.