‘The Blood of Dawnwalker’ Understands That There Are Worse Things Than Running Out of Time
I return frequently, both in my public criticism and in my private writings, to questions about time. Not simply how much of it we possess, but what scarcity does to the meaning of our decisions, how finitude transforms preference into priority, and why so many of our deepest sorrows are ultimately inseparable from the fact that time only moves in one direction. Classic existentialist echoes. While I did not necessarily sit down with The Blood of Dawnwalker intending to meditate on these all-too-familiar questions, the majority of my experience with this phenomenal game was marinated in the pragmatic reminder that life’s guaranteed terminus amplifies the urgency of examining life as we encounter it now.
What I hoped The Blood of Dawnwalker, spiritual successor to one of my all-time games, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, would fulfill was not another Geralt nor another collection of question marks distributed across a generously populated map. My idiosyncratic adoration for The Witcher 3 was so much richer than its mere iconography, as I submerged myself in the books, TV show, and games all within the same short window.
The promise of Dawnwalker was a fresh step into a new universe governed by the Witcher series’ principles. Going into this experience, I craved more of the strange sensation that the Witcher’s world provoked within my imagination, that it existed morally beyond me, that Geralt could arrive in the middle of some small human catastrophe and discover there was no configuration of dialogue options capable of making everyone whole. No matter what, there was sacrifice, and that bitter reality ultimately enabled the Witcher series to surpass the Game of Thrones books in my personal canon of serialized fantasy fiction.
The Witcher 3 understood that sometimes the most meaningful role-playing choice is not deciding which outcome is good and which is evil, but deciding what you can live with after discovering that every available outcome contains some residue of suffering. Its best quests understood morality as something closer to triage than judgment.
The Witcher 3’s enormous inheritance would constitute shoes too big to fill for nearly any other franchise seeking to take up the currently dormant mantle, but extraordinarily that same excellence is what I recognize most strongly in The Blood of Dawnwalker. It is considerably rougher than The Witcher 3, sometimes distractingly so, and there is a substantial amount of Eurojank here: bugs, framerate problems, awkward transitions, occasional typographical errors in the script, and other little abrasions that ought to have disappeared somewhere between editing and certification. There were moments when I could practically see the seams strains to hold things together, yet that never deterred me from accidentally letting an intended two-hour playsession emerge as a five-hour one. Beneath all of those imperfections is the increasingly rare sensation of playing a game whose designers have presented an argument about what role-playing ought to mean, and who are willing to inconvenience the player in order to make that argument.
The most important of those inconveniences is time, although calling Dawnwalker’s time mechanic an inconvenience undersells how completely it reorganized my relationship with the game’s interfaces and, consequentially, its narrative. Dawnwalker takes one of the most familiar lies told by role-playing games – that the world is ending, but only whenever the player decides they are finished exploring – and asks what might happen if the player were actually required to believe the threat.
Time Is Something You Spend
Early in The Blood of Dawnwalker, Coen’s family is taken hostage by Boyar Brencis, the dictator and progenitor of the Vrakiri – or simply, vampire – class. Under Brencis’ capture, Coen’s family’s deaths await them at a lunar coronation ceremony thirty days later. In another role-playing game, I might have understood those thirty days primarily as narrative framing: an urgent deadline within the fiction that nevertheless remains politely suspended until I decide I am ready to confront it. After all, RPGs routinely ask us to inhabit worlds supposedly hurtling toward catastrophe while simultaneously encouraging us to wander away from that catastrophe for hours at a time. (Who amongst us hasn’t played a few hours of Queen’s Blood?) As players, we accept the contradiction because exploration requires a certain elasticity of time. The narrative insists that every moment matters, while the structure of the game quietly reassures us that nothing truly important will happen without our direct involvement.
Dawnwalker refuses that arrangement by treating its thirty days not as a constantly ticking real-time clock, nor the standard day-night cycle characteristic to modern RPGs, but instead as a finite resource. Each daytime and nighttime period contains eight units that can be consumed by marked actions, while simply wandering around Vale Sangora does not inexorably drain the clock. Senior Quest Designer Patryk Fijalkowski explained the philosophy succinctly before release: “We want players to feel tension. We want them to think about time actively like a resource.” That distinction matters enormously because Dawnwalker’s system does not punish curiosity so much as demand commitment. I can wander, investigate, and think for as long as I want, but eventually I have to decide which discoveries deserve some portion of Coen’s finite future.
Tauriq Moosa identifies, in his exceptional piece on Critical Verdict, the more profound consequence of Dawnwalker’s time system. Moosa argues that time becomes a “shaper” of narrative rather than merely an obstacle to experiencing it, eventually describing time as a “bridge rather than gate to the story.” Moosa’s distinction is essential to understanding why the mechanic worked so well for me. Dawnwalker does not merely present its options as restricted; it asks me to author my version of Coen through the things I decide are worth doing. No matter how pre-authored, the illusion of player participation in the building of the narrative is palpable in Dawnwalker, which is one of its greatest successes.
My Coen therefore emerged through allocation, which produced an anxiety that followed me through virtually my entire playthrough. Every enticing quest became an accounting problem in my mental spreadsheet of prioritization, every new person asking for help represented not only a narrative possibility but an expenditure, and every tantalizing mystery forced me to consider what I might sacrifice by pursuing it. Often times, I found myself ignoring obvious quests that would award me with treasure in order to prioritize character relationships and storylines. It was only towards the final week in the game that I became fully comfortable treating time as a commodity, because I knew that no matter what else lay ahead of me, I would be able to handle its challenge.
Throughout my playthrough, I wondered how much of Coen’s humanity I wanted to preserve and how enthusiastically I wanted to explore the vampire he was becoming. This created an interesting internal contradiction in how I tried to play Coen. In narrative beats, I tried to retain Coen’s humanity and avoid unnecessary human loss, particularly when feeding on their blood. In the game’s three skill trees, however, which are distributed amongst Witchcraft, Swordmastery, and Vampiric abilities, I found myself maxing out the Vampire side of his abilities far more than the other branches. The game turns opportunity cost into characterization, and that contradiction I felt within Coen’s identity was directly formed as a result of that implied sacrifice.
And then there was Anca, who rapidly demolished whatever illusion I possessed that I was approaching these decisions with dispassionate rationality. I was smitten with her almost immediately, and once I realized that Dawnwalker might actually allow me to pursue that affection, whatever disciplined cost-benefit analysis I had pretended to be performing collapsed spectacularly. She belongs to the human life from which Coen is increasingly estranged, somebody who knew him before he was turned into a dawnwalker, and that history makes pursuing her feel connected to the broader question of what remains of Coen as his identity becomes increasingly blurry.
So, naturally, I dropped literally everything else and pursued Anca, completely aware of my family’s impending ritual sacrifice. What can I say? In video games, some things are more important than family. In any case, the eventual sex scene was definitely worth the journey. But more importantly, the intimacy between Anca and Coen felt meaningful because Dawnwalker had made that relationship cost something more significant than selecting the correct flirt option. It cost time, meaning that my affection for Anca occupied part of the same finite resource I needed to save Coen’s family.
My experience with Anca reminds me of Moosa’s article once more, namely the idea that “time as the mortal enemy of humanity is also its key architect,” a formulation that captures the peculiar philosophical coherence of Dawnwalker’s time mechanic. Finitude gives decisions their shape in Dawnwalker, as in life. If I could complete every quest, exhaust every dialogue tree, romance everyone, investigate every mystery, upgrade every skill, and then stroll into the finale whenever I felt sufficiently finished, my choices would ultimately reflect little more than my patience. Instead, Dawnwalker asks me to construct Coen through exclusion, because choosing something necessarily means risking the abandonment of something else.
For most of the game, then, I was frightened of running out of time, and the brilliance of that anxiety is that it eventually became so habitual I stopped consciously thinking of it as something Dawnwalker was doing to me. Time’s passage simply became the psychological texture of playing the game. The calculation in the back of my mind became automated, another little awareness that whatever I was doing now existed at the expense of something I might never see. But then a quest late in my playthrough, “Home Sweet Home,” taught me that there are worse things than running out of time.
Home Sweet Home
With seven days left on the in-game countdown, I climbed Aurelius’s Tower in the Silts while investigating the manufacture of gargoyles, creatures that had already become some of Dawnwalker’s most unnerving enemies. “Creature,” though, is perhaps the wrong word. Gargoyles are not animals or supernatural beings that simply inhabit Vale Sangora; they are manufactured horrors, assembled through an obscene mixture of alchemy, blood magic, human engineering, and human components. Their clay-and-metal bodies terminate in enormous batlike wings and articulated blades where ordinary limbs ought to be, while their masklike faces and glowing red eyes lend them the appearance of medieval grotesques reconstructed according to the logic of an abattoir.
Even fighting gargoyles reinforces the unnaturalness of the things. They can take to the air beyond Coen’s reach before descending violently upon him, while their bladed limbs and ability to rapidly recover from wounds transform them into relentless combatants that seem less alive than engineered for the specific purpose of refusing to die. Dawnwalker’s gargoyles are not merely monsters but technology, if technology can be broadly understood to encompass the point at which human ingenuity, occult knowledge, and cruelty become indistinguishable from one another.
There is something appropriately Witcher-like about the fact that understanding this monster makes it worse. These are not beasts whose violence can be attributed to hunger, territorial instinct, or even some ancient curse – gargoyles are products of intelligence. Someone conceived of them, someone discovered how to build them, and someone decided that human ingenuity would be best expressed by creating a flying machine capable of carving people apart. The gargoyle therefore embodies one of the oldest anxieties running through Gothic literature and its descendants, and the resultant terror is not merely the acceptance that monsters exist, but the twisted adjoinder that human beings possess both the arrogance and technical capacity to manufacture these monstrosities. Dawnwalker literalizes that hubris in clay, metal, blood, and blades.
By the time I reached the summit of the tower, I thought I understood the shape of the story being told. Somewhere beyond the final door was the person responsible for these monstrosities, and Dawnwalker had conditioned me to understand what entering that room would cost. Opening the door consumes four precious time segments, transforming even this apparently straightforward act of confrontation into another calculation about the value of my remaining time. Previously along my ascent, I had seemingly completed the quest that brought me there; alas, behind another door lie a final staircase that I simply couldn’t ignore. Despite this steep time cost of four segments, I opened the door anyway, expecting an epic confrontation.
But then, inexplicably, Coen woke up at home. He closed the door in his peasant garb, entered the familiar courtyard from the beginning of the game, before everything went wrong. And there emerges Pieter, his father, asking Coen to chop wood like it was the prologue all over again, like nothing was amiss. The abruptness of this transition is disorienting because Dawnwalker momentarily appears to have performed the impossible. After spending the entire game teaching me that time moves inexorably forward and that everything I value must therefore compete for some portion of it, the game has somehow moved dramatically backwards. For a few precious moments, Dawnwalker gives something back, one of the cruelest tricks available to narratives steeped in grief. At long last, you get to be with your family again.
Just as soon as you might be tempted to believe this mirage is really happening, a gargoyle crashes through the fantasy and rips hope away again. The choice of monster here matters. This nightmare could have been interrupted by any one of Dawnwalker’s many horrors, but the gargoyle carries with it the thematic residue of everything Coen has just discovered: something constructed, something unnatural, something brought into existence because somebody possessed the capacity to make it and failed to reckon with what that creation would destroy.
Coen will eventually confess beneath the tree in his childhood refuge that he believes he breaks everything he touches, and the gargoyle that destroys his restored home anticipates precisely that conception of guilt. The gargoyle is perfect here because it embodies a thing that should never have existed crashing into a world that can no longer exist, collapsing invention and memory into the same nightmare of irreversible damage.
Consequently, Coen attempts to complete the familiar videogame grammar of salvation. Save the family, defeat the monster, escape the nightmare. Even in a game committed to moral complication, I still believed I possessed enough videogame literacy to understand the apparent structure of the thing. The sequence initially feels like a surreal miniature of Dawnwalker’s larger objective, condensing the thirty-day rescue mission into something that might finally permit the clean victory the larger game has continually complicated. But right after taking down the gargoyle and reuniting with your family yet again, Coen wakes up.
And his father asks him to chop wood for breakfast.
This initial repetition is where “Home Sweet Home” begins dismantling the mechanical language that The Blood of Dawnwalker has spent the entire game teaching. Following the same sequence merely returns Coen to its beginning, and doing so repeatedly can become catastrophically consequential: remain obedient to the nightmare long enough and Coen can surrender to it completely, producing the secret “Together Forever” ending. You are supposed to notice a mysterious voice luring you to a well in the distance of a courtyard, but I completed the loop two times, expecting something different to happen, before wondering what I was missing. In looking up the solution, I realized there was a hidden ending tucked away, requiring me to complete this loop sequence four times; only on the fifth does the achievement pop and the credits roll, entrapping Coen with his artificial family forevermore.
The brilliance of “Home Sweet Home” is that the game that has spent dozens of hours warning me about insufficient time suddenly presents the opposite danger. Coen is presented a gluttonous infinity of the time he wants here in this loop because there is no tomorrow toward which any of it can move. He can rescue his family forever, eat breakfast forever, watch them disappear forever, and awaken forever to the sound of his father asking him to chop wood that becomes increasingly bloody the more he chops it.
For almost the entire game, time means loss through movement. Every expenditure carries Coen closer to the moment when Brencis intends to kill his family, so the anxiety comes from knowing that time will not stop merely because I have more people I want to help, more mysteries I want to investigate, or one more evening I would rather spend pursuing Anca (or Lacra, or…if I’m feeling spicy on a replay, Mirat).
“Home Sweet Home” finally grants the impossible wish underlying all of that anxiety by stopping the clock, and, in doing so, reveals why a world without time would be infinitely worse. Here, my anxiety did not disappear so much as mutate, exchanging the fear that I cannot do everything before time runs out for the considerably more existential horror that nothing I do can make time begin again. Scarcity becomes stasis, urgency becomes repetition, and the familiar RPG compulsion to find the correct sequence of actions begins to resemble Coen’s own psychological compulsion to revisit a past that cannot be repaired. The question is no longer whether I have enough time to save everyone; it is what I might have to sacrifice in order to escape.
The Boy at the Bottom of the Well
Escaping the nightmare of “Home Sweet Home” requires Coen to stop obeying its logic. On a subsequent cycle, after rescuing his siblings, Coen can investigate a frozen well instead of continuing toward the familiar gargoyle confrontation, following a voice that leads him away from the repetition he has been conditioned to complete. What waits beyond that diversion is a moral excavation. Dawnwalker understands that the only way Coen can escape the fantasy is by remembering the reality from which he has spent his life running, including elements of Coen’s familial life that were formerly obfuscated to the player.
The name Coen has to remember when gazing into the well is “Alin,” and with that name, the nightmare changes. What initially resembled an endless repetition of the game’s opening becomes an excavation of Coen’s memory, taking him through recollections associated with the destroyed church and requiring him to reconstruct what has been forgotten. The sequence moves through Alin, his family, and finally Coen himself, transforming a puzzle about escaping a supernatural prison into something closer to psychological archaeology. Mechanically, the game has replaced repetition with remembrance.
Eventually Coen chases a boy from the church into the woods, returning to a place that had once belonged to the two of them. “I ran, and ran, and ran, until I got here,” Coen remembers. “Our safe spot.” There, he encounters the artifacts of childhood, including a little wooden horse made by Alin, a boy Coen remembers as extraordinarily gifted — but memory does not preserve these objects cleanly. Coen remembers breaking things, remembers the wooden skates and his own destructive grief, and finally articulates the shattered self-conception that has been submerged beneath the now-confident adult man we have been heretofore inhabiting: “I broke it. I broke everything I ever touched.”
Coen’s subsequent breakdown is difficult to watch precisely because there is nothing heroic about it. Beneath the swing tied to the tree, with rain crashing around him, Coen is not the hybrid warrior who can scale walls as a vampire or wield witchcraft as a human. For once, he is the adult continuation of a terrified child who constructed an entire moral identity around the worst thing that ever happened to him. The heroic protagonist temporarily disappears, leaving behind a Russian nesting doll, hollow, treating pain as evidence of his guilt.
This emotional collapse leads into a physical descent toward the river, hundreds of feet below the cliff at which Coen’s emotions unfurled. Coen reaches the river, and at its edge is Alin, still a child and still bound in time by the final memory Coen has spent his life trying not to inhabit.
The truth emerges piecemeal. Their father had warned the boys to stay away from the river because the weather was warming and the ice was becoming dangerous, but they went anyway. Alin fell through. Coen could not find his brother beneath the ice, panicked, and ran home. Pieter returned and broke through the frozen surface until he recovered his son’s body.
For Coen, the sequence has calcified into a brutally simple moral equation: I survived; Alin did not; therefore I am guilty. The extraordinary thing about the conversation that follows in “Home Sweet Home” is that Alin refuses Coen’s equation without denying any of its premises. Their father warned them, Coen disobeyed him, and Alin did die. Dawnwalker does not resolve Coen’s grief by producing some hidden villain responsible for the accident, because there is no vampire beneath the ice, no plague to blame, and no late conspiratorial revelation capable of transferring culpability to someone more conveniently evil. The facts remain exactly as painful as Coen remembers them, enshrouded by regret. What changes is the meaning he has assigned to those facts, granted by Alin’s forgiveness.
When Coen’s guilt reaches its ugliest formulation, Alin deescalates this guilt to its logical absurdity. If Coen believes that ignoring their father’s warning means he killed his brother, then he must also believe that he intended Alin to die. Coen recoils from the suggestion because, of course, he did not, to which Alin responds with the distinction Coen has been unable to grant himself. That is, if he did not mean to kill his brother, then Coen needs to stop living as though he did. Responsibility and intention are not interchangeable, regret is not murder, and a child making a reckless decision is not the same thing as choosing to murder another human being, however desperately the adult that child becomes might want to impose a comprehensible moral structure upon an incomprehensible loss.
Alin reminds him of something Coen has denied himself for years: he was a child too, only two years older than the brother whose death he has treated as the foundational moral judgment of his life. Alin’s observation of the minor age gap is simple enough to sound almost banal outside the context of the scene, but that simplicity is the mechanism that makes Coen’s grief all the more devastating. Coen has spent years judging a child with the moral tenacity of an adult, with all the wisdom and foresight that maturity entails.
“Did It Make the Pain Go Away?”
The dialogue choice that affected me most came when Alin asked why Coen never returned to this place — the river and, perhaps, the past — and the phrasing of the question matters because Coen initially misunderstands what his brother is asking. He thinks Alin wants to know why Coen left him beneath the ice, but Alin instead wants to know why Coen never came back here, to visit him, to the place where his memory remained waiting for closure. Alin’s subversive question transforms abandonment from something Coen did on the day Alin died into something he has continued doing ever since, namely, running away.
The player has the option for Coen to call himself a coward, but I could not make him do that in the grip of this emotional moment, so I instead chose the answer that he never returned to Alin because it was simply “too painful.” Alin’s response is not accusatory, either. He plaintively asks whether staying away “worked,” whether refusing to return made the pain disappear. Coen has already lived the answer, and he admits that it did not. Avoidance did not diminish the grief but rather strengthened it, allowing the memory to grow larger and more terrible because he never permitted himself to encounter it as anything other than an accusation.
There is something painfully recognizable in the final words of their exchange that extends far beyond Coen’s specific tragedy. Grief encourages a peculiar superstition about memory, that remembering is what hurts us and therefore forgetting might save us. We avoid the photograph, the song, the place. We construct elaborate lives around absences and then confuse our success as independent of those vacuums. The wound remains perfectly preserved precisely because we refuse to touch it, while the passage of years can perversely make an untouched memory feel more powerful rather than less.
That paradox is what makes “Home Sweet Home” such an astonishing inversion of Dawnwalker’s central mechanic. For the rest of the game, time heals nothing because time is scarce. Here, uniquely, time heals nothing because time has stopped. Coen has been emotionally standing beside that very river for years, and the nightmare merely makes the metaphor literal, thereby freezing it in place to observe. Coen does not need more time with Alin, because in a sense he has never left him. What he needs is the possibility of finally moving from the moment in which Alin died into a life that exists in the wake of his absence.
Alin eventually asks whether Coen can possibly forgive himself now that he has sought closure in this sequence. I chose to answer that Coen can forgive himself only if he manages to save their family from Brencis, a choice that still sounded like Coen bargaining with the echoes of his guilt. He still wants absolution to be transactional, as though performing one sufficiently heroic act might finally balance the universe’s scales in the eyes of his God. Saving Coen’s family retroactively repays the brother he could not save at the river. By this logic, trauma is turned into debt and heroism into currency.
Conversely, Alin refuses that transactional logic, reassuring Coen that he hopes he succeeds but that whether he does or not says nothing about his worth. Alin’s sentiment quietly dismantles the moral machinery upon which the protagonist has been subconsciously operating. Coen has spent The Blood of Dawnwalker behaving as though the outcome of these thirty days will finally determine what kind of person he is: human or vampire, brother or failure, savior or monster. Every hourglass icon, every new relationship, reinforces the idea that Coen is being measured by what he can accomplish before the clock expires. Alin, on the other hand, proposes a radically more compassionate alternative – that Coen’s worth cannot be calculated according to the number of people he manages to save, in the past or the present.
For a game obsessed with consequentialism, Alin’s proposition is startling because Dawnwalker does not usually allow us the comfort of believing outcomes are irrelevant. The game constantly distinguishes consequence from worth, insisting that failure can matter enormously without becoming proof that the person who failed is therefore worthless. That distinction is the very same one Coen has been unable to make regarding his relationship to Alin.
There Are Worse Things Than Running Out of Time
The looping nightmare eventually relinquishes Coen, who awakens atop the tower to discover that the horrifying metaphysical ordeal we have just experienced has an almost grotesquely mundane explanation. He has been unconscious at the mercy of the man responsible for this place, the person he spied on when I decided to sacrifice four segments of time to investigate the gargoyles. Coen returns from one of the most emotionally devastating confrontations of his life and responds to the immediate physical threat with understandable bewilderment, the surreal collision between psychological horror and material danger becoming almost darkly comic after everything that emotionally preceded it. An axe is swung at Coen’s head, and without player intervention, Coen ends this sadistic man’s life before realizing where he has awoken.
The natural inclination of most players would probably be to see the “quest complete” signifier and move on. But returning to the tower afterward was still on my mind, wondering about the gargoyles and their origins. Reascending and scouring the room you initially intended to enter provides the final grotesque punctuation mark, revealing more about what was happening to the people imprisoned there and connecting the nightmare back to the manufactured horrors that first brought Coen to the tower.
That temporal connection matters because “Home Sweet Home” begins with one kind of creation and ends by confronting another. Bodies are reshaped into monsters in the way that memories are reshaped into prisons. The same human impulse toward domination that produces the gargoyle finds its psychological equivalent in a nightmare that takes another person’s most intimate suffering and turns it into machinery.
Yet after leaving the tower, I kept thinking about the game’s clock, because for most of The Blood of Dawnwalker I had watched it obsessively. With seven, now six days left in my Dawnwalker journey, could I truly afford this indulgent quest? As I answered this question with a confident “yes,” I zoomed out to my earlier internal doubts about whether I should pursue certain leads, restore shrines, take down vampiric outposts, spend more time simping for Anca, and so forth. At the heart of these inquiries was the uncertainty of what my Coen cared about enough to spend his finite life pursuing. These questions had become so fundamental to my experience of Dawnwalker that I had begun treating the clock almost as another character, an invisible companion silently evaluating everything I chose.
Returning to Moosa’s piece from above, he argues that this temporal limitation is precisely what gives Dawnwalker its unusual narrative power, writing that “Finitude forces us to act, to choose.” More than almost any open-world RPG I have played, Dawnwalker made the passage of time feel constitutive of character. My Coen was not simply the collection of dialogue options I selected or skills I unlocked. Rather, he was the sum of the things for which I decided there was time, as well as the things I necessarily left undone. Coen leaving a prisoner to face a public flogging speaks as much to his character as whether I passed an equivalent amount of time on a new skill tree upgrade.
“Home Sweet Home” understands the other half of this moral equation, because if finitude forces us to choose, infinity can prevent us from choosing anything at all. The “Together Forever” ending makes that horror explicit with an achievement unlocking and the credits rolling prematurely. Coen can indeed remain inside the fantasy, where his family can be restored each morning. Whatever happens afterward ceases to matter because there is no afterward, and what initially appears to be salvation gradually reveals itself as annihilation. Instead of saving his imperiled family, Coen has surrendered the future in exchange for an eternal past.
That exchange is grief’s most seductive promise, and Dawnwalker understands that the promise does not need to be articulated through some grand supernatural temptation. The loop, after all, expresses the same notion by its very nature. Stay here and play it again, the loop whispers, perhaps this time you can change what happened, perhaps this time the ice will hold, perhaps this time the people you love will remain sitting around the table where you remember them, put together again. Coen’s and the player’s fantasy of correcting the past becomes indistinguishable from the refusal to possess a future.
The Blood of Dawnwalker spends most of its runtime convincing the player that the tragedy of human existence is that there is never enough time. Thirty days translates to hundred of finite segments, all of which enter a bracket of inevitable sacrifices. Dawnwalker’s time mechanic is a remarkably effective system because it makes mortality mechanical, forcing every meaningful choice to consume some portion of a resource that cannot be replenished. The fact that the system inspired anxiety in me was not a flaw in its design but its greatest accomplishment, in my estimation, because eventually I stopped thinking abstractly about Coen’s priorities and instead began feeling the existential pressure of what it means to have priorities at all.
Atop an otherwise unremarkable tower, Dawnwalker removes the clock and reveals why we needed it in the first place. If there’s a throughline of my professional writings, it’s a preoccupation with the paradoxical positioning of time in human existence, the spectrum of simultaneous tedium and terror that it represents. In Dawnwalker, without time there is no ‘after,’ and without ‘after’ there may be no finality to grief, but there is no healing either. There is only Coen’s microcosmic loop: the breakfast table, the gargoyle, the rescue, the church, and the reset. There is only a little wooden horse and a pair of broken skates, a boy buried beneath the ice and an older brother forever arriving too late to save him. The horror of “Home Sweet Home” is not that Coen has lost his brother once, but that he has discovered a place where he can lose him again – forever.
The brilliance of “Home Sweet Home” is therefore not simply the fact that it contains some of the strongest pathos in The Blood of Dawnwalker, stirring our sypathies for Coen. This quest takes the defining mechanical idea of the entire game and, brilliantly, inverts it, turning the emotional implication of the original mechanic inward instead of outward. For dozens of hours I feared the clock because I thought time was my enemy, something constantly separating me from quests, storylines, and yes, naughty scenes, I desperately wanted to preserve. “Home Sweet Home” made me appreciate that time was the vehicle allowing Coen to escape in the first place, because a finite life, unlike a memory, at least possesses the promise of becoming something other than what it was yesterday.
The clock moves because life does, and Dawnwalker ultimately understands that forward-ticking movement as simultaneously the source of our deepest grief and the only reason grief can ever become survivable. We lose things because time moves forward, but moving forward is also what allows loss to become memory rather than environment, something we carry instead of somewhere we remain trapped. In “Home Sweet Home,” Coen cannot save Alin because Alin is dead, which parallels his inability to repair the childhood that ended on that frozen river. After all, the child Coen was no longer exists. What Coen can do, finally, is hopefully what we all can do: remember our painful pasts without converting that memory into an indictment of our intrinsic right to continue on, to keep living, mistakes and all.
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