An Interactive Visual Novel By Draw Distance

Review By Talia R Heart

SPOILER NOTICE: This review contains non-specific SPOILERS for the game.

TRIGGER WARNING: This game reviewed here contains adult themes including violence (up to and including murder), sexuality, images NSFW, psychological manipulation, language of intolerance to minority groups. Reader & player discretion is advised.

“Coteries of New York” (CoNY) and “Shadows of New York” (SoNY) are an interesting pair to be sure. While either can be used or viewed as an introduction to “The World of Darkness” (“Vampire: The Masquerade” in particular), SoNY was envisioned as a direct sequel to CoNY and the game will make more sense to you if you’ve played through CoNY at least once. While CoNY gives you more choices regarding the character clan, gender, and name, in SoNY you take on the role of Julia Sowinski, the newly-embraced Lasombra representative of New York City. Many characters from CoNY reappear in SoNY, including Qadir, the Toreador Sheriff of NYC whom Julia reports to an ostensibly works for in SoNY.

            A major criticism by players of CoNY was that, for all the choices you can make in the game, you always end up corralled into a single ending. SoNY retains the dictionary feature of CoNY to help new players along, but you also gain TRAITS depending on the choices you make and actions you take after Julia’s embrace, and these, along with whose advice you chose to trust, leads to two different possible endings. To make things more interesting, though, using Julia’s “Oblivion” discipline occasionally grants you bonus scenes with ghosts, so use that power when given a choice to experience these.

            While CoNY played much more like video game, SoNY is much more “visual novel” than its predecessor, and like CoNY, the art does not fail to impress, and a solid soundtrack accompanies SoNY. While these are strengths for SoNY, the detail of the narrative does drag on at times, and I’d argue that while two endings ensure you’ll want to replay SoNY at least once, the focus on a single pre-chosen character as opposed to one of three chosen and named by the player offers less value in replays after that than in CoNY. SoNY is also shorter, its other main “weakness” compared to CoNY (a 6-8 hour playthrough vs CoNYs 10-12 hours of play).

            Overall, the strengths outweigh the downsides of this game and for its price, SoNY is a good value and we encourage all fans of “Vampire the Masquerade” and especially of CoNY to buy it, and give both the game and Draw Distance a thumb’s up. AUTHOR’S NOTE (6-7-22): While I already owned and played SoNY prior to collaborating with Draw Distance, the publishers of this game, they participated in my “March to 3,000 Giveaway/Loyal Peeps Celebration Giveaway” (they provided 2 game keys for both CoNY & SoNY, & happily both sets have gone to excited winners!), however my review was not affected by this and no demands were laid on me by Draw Distance in exchange.

“Shadows of New York (SoNY)” is available for PC (Windows, MacOS, Linux) as well as on PS4, XBoxOne, & Nintendo Switch. The game is available on Steam at a regular price (as of 5-26-22) of $12.99. A “Shadows of New York Artbook” & “Shadows of New York Soundtrack” are available digitally for purchase with the game itself as part of a “Deluxe Edition” but are also sold separately for $6.99 & $3.99 respectively on Steam or Storyteller’s Vault. The “Artbook” & “Soundtrack” also each get a “thumb’s up’’ from myself & Hillary.