Showtime: Vampire Diaries

Genre: Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Showtime: Vampire Diaries, released on Nintendo Switch in 2023, is an odd game that has players taking the role of an interviewer asking questions of a vampire on a TV show, trying to avoid asking anything that will upset him. It’s hard to pin this game down to a genre… it could almost be a Visual Novel, except the game goes back and forth between the vampire saying something and you selecting your next question. You could suggest it as a Puzzle or Trivia game, except you’re not really given any indication how to select the correct question to ask. You just have to make your choice and hope for the best.

This is one of the first obvious flaws to this game – everything is down to trial and error. Will the vampire attack you for asking a fluff question, or are you better off asking something hard-hitting that might touch on a sensitive topic? Will the vampire be upset with you for walking on eggshells, or attack you for acting relaxed and casual? There’s really no way of knowing until you try it and quite possibly hit a game over screen, forced to start over again from the beginning.

This hits on another issue with this game – the text scrawl at the beginning of the game is painfully slow, and you’re forced to sit through it every time you restart the game. This makes an already dreadful experience worse, meaning every time you select a wrong answer, you’re not dreading the vampire’s wrath, you’re dreading having to sit through the game’s opening yet again.

It might almost be worth it if the story this game told was one worth sitting through, but neither the world or characters are all that interesting here, with dialogue that often seems just as inane as the worst talk show fare, made worse due to poor writing with terrible grammar. What’s more, when you select a wrong question to ask and get a bad ending, the visuals that accompany this bad ending often do not match what is being described.

This terrible gameplay and bad writing is joined by cartoony visuals that aren’t terrible but that do nothing to elevate this game, and these visuals are backed by what sounds like lounge music, which might make sense for the relaxed and tongue-in-cheek tone the game is aiming for, but doesn’t mesh with the TV show setting or vampire theme.

It’s difficult for me to see much reason for anyone to play Showtime: Vampire Diaries, beyond its fun premise. The gameplay is pointless and tedious, the writing is terrible, the presentation isn’t compelling and doesn’t fit the game very well. If you want a fun interview with vampires, I suggest you use the money you would have spent on this game and spend it instead on the film What We Do in the Shadows, or the TV series by the same name – both of them are absolutely hilarious, and you’ll have far more fun watching either of them than you will with this pointless game.

tl;dr – Showtime: Vampire Diaries is a game that has you selecting questions to ask in a TV interview with a vampire, with players guessing through trial and error which answers won’t upset the vampire. The gameplay is pointless and tedious, the writing is terrible, and the presentation does little to improve things here. The result is a terrible game that gives players no good reason to play it.

Grade: D-

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