BloodNet – Final Rating

by Will Moczarski

The time has come for the final rating of the "cyberpunk vampire adventure game" BloodNet – or is it a cyberpunk vampire RPG? When I started reviewing this game back in fall 2022, I made two predictions: there’ll be more coincidental Muse lyrics than “time is running out” in my posts before I get to pen the final rating. And “exploring the far reaches of Cyberspace” will surely be a chore. Both of them were wrong. Cyberspace was alright (although there are some who will beg to differ), and I refrained from quoting Muse altogether as far as I'm aware. Before I try to break down the sprawling mess that is BloodNet, however, let's take a look at what the contemporary magazines had to say about it. 

Reviews of BloodNet were either enthusiastic or mixed although even the enthusiastic reviews have some reservations. Paul Rand (Computer and Video Games) gave BloodNet a 91 but was apparently torn between finding BloodNet "simply superb" and "stunning" and conceding that "at times it's so weird and complex I just haven't a clue as to what is going on." The most positive review (in terms of the text, not the rating) comes from Andy Butcher of PC Gamer who rates it at 90 and applauds among other things its "[s]uperb atmosphere", seeing only its complexity and its gore factor ("not for the faint of heart") as negative issues. Cal Jones of PC Review sees it as a soul mate to games like Beneath a Steel Sky and Veil of Darkness and gives it an 8 out of 10. "BloodNet is a game you can really get your teeth into", according to Jones (ouch). "Squalid, seedy and utterly brilliant." 

Steve Bauman (Computer Games Strategy Plus) thinks that, as a genre hybrid, BloodNet is more interesting than the Quest for Glory games. Douglas Seacat's review for Computer Gaming World is more reserved, concluding that "BloodNet can be compared to an uncut gem; it is a dark and wonderful gem of an idea, but a gem without polish." Julian Schoffel's review for Hyper is similarly on the fence, calling navigating through cyberspace a "royal pain in the ass!" His overall assessment is that BloodNet is "[q]uite an innovative game for Microprose. Cyberpunk fanatics will love it." He goes on to give it a rating of 70. Charlie Brooker (PC Zone) agrees and concludes that "[h]indered by outdated implementation", BloodNet is "still well worth a look at", rating it at 75. 

All of these ratings are probably far beyond what the PISSED rating will be. The TAG community guessed an average of 39 points, and a GIMLET rating of 41 points. Morpheus further predicted that both Chet and I would be deducting points for something or other. Let's see how well it holds up! I read Chet's final post only after having written my own final rating (the same is true of the magazine reviews) and will get back to that below. Let's get crackin'.

Puzzles & Solvability:

Are there actual puzzles in this game? I kept asking myself that question while playing BloodNet (and some of you did, too) but while a number of the challenges might qualify most of them still didn't feel like puzzles. Does that have to be a bad thing? I'm not sure. The game is construed around quests but so is Simon the Sorcerer so it's not really an RPG thing. Most of the game's puzzles if you want to call them that boil down to "fetch me this", "kill that guy", and so on. There's sort of a meta puzzle, however: it's vital to process a lot of information, figure out well codes, put together the big picture. It's reminiscent of Mortville Manor and Maupiti Island in that sense but not quite as free-form. 

The amount of data the game throws at you is nothing short of overwhelming. I imagine that some of my blog posts must have felt the same to you, dear readers, and I apologise for that. It's a difficult game to break down. It's actually the first game I played for this blog where I didn't include everything I did in the entries but rather tried to stick to the main plot and a selection of side quests. Even so, there was a lot going on. As a player, you have to be on your toes from the very beginning. I actually missed a key hint in the opening montage because I watched it like a movie instead of looking for clues right off the bat. Only by reading the CRPG Addict's second entry about the game did I learn of my mistake because there is no in-game hint at the well "hope" after the opening cinematics.

This game's needle in a haystack.

Spying on Walter McCalaster was one of few puzzles that stood out as a classic adventure game puzzle. Another one would be passing Sir Theodoric's mirror test to prove that I'm not a vampire. The cloisters in general felt like a separate puzzle section. Also, turning Renfield's crib into a place where a vampire could rest (although that's not mandatory, just convenient). Most of the others were a matter of following hints, fetching items, picking the right weapons for the endgame combat (if that even counts as a puzzle). The crossword clues and the note in three languages actually were more like RPG puzzles (like something out of Might & Magic, maybe). The jury-rigging elements (building a cyborg, for example) are also more akin to combined RPG fetch quests (find herbs to mix a potion). 

Looking back on my playthrough I always kept a quest log rather than a list of unsolved puzzles. I think that figures although I have to admit that Simon the Sorcerer largely worked the same way. I would have relegated my quest log firmly to RPG territory but for the fact that I played these two games back to back. It may well be the structure of the plot and the look'n'feel of the interface rather than the puzzles that makes Simon feel more like an adventure game while BloodNet does have some RPG elements. On the surface, it even walks and quacks like an RPG but you could easily think of a remaster of the game with no stats and no combat – and it would probably even be better. It's a tough call.

As for solvability, the sudden spike in difficulty towards the end combined with the sudden reliance on combat really threw me a curve ball. I didn't encounter any dead ends (the game starts with a dead man walking scenario anyway, ha ha ha...sorry) but it's probably possible to bite the wrong NPC or run out of resources. Also, the game has two time limits: you slowly turn into a vampire and at some point Shock Maraud's goons will be after you (more on that below). Thankfully, there's no pixel hunting and no hidden exits in BloodNet which was a big relief because I played this right after Simon the Sorcerer. 3.

This game's Hylian Homeowner quest.

Interface & Inventory: 

The interface is a bit confusing in the beginning but that's to be expected from a cyberpunk game from the early 1990's (System Shock, I'm looking at you.) It's not too bad, and I got used to it pretty quickly. I didn't like the combat system as much. Placing your party in strategically interesting positions in the room to attract the attention of your enemies accordingly would be quite nice...if it worked. As it is, there's a lot of trial and error involved, and the same setups often yielded vastly different results. 

Cyberspace looks, feels and works very differently as well as it should. And the same applies here: It was confusing at first but after a few attempts navigation was a non-issue. The city map is nice to look at but quite confusing. Remembering where to find what shop, what gang, what location in general was all but impossible without taking and keeping notes. This could have benefited from a more casual interface and I never really remembered any places beyond some basics (cloisters in the north, TransTech in the south). 

Clan in da front, punks in the back

Skills don't seem to make much of a difference. They are there to lend the game RPG credentials on the surface but you really only need lockpicking and jury-rigging every once in a while, maybe combat skills (not even sure about those). The cyberskills didn't visibly factor into the game, neither did most of the others. Maybe they did but if it's not really noticable I'd say they didn't. It's mostly a matter of getting better equipment, I think, and although there may be differences they appear to be so nuanced that they don't really matter in the end. I started various new games and didn't observe any differences concerning the interaction with NPCs, or even combat. I quickly resorted to the quick character generation and it didn't feel like it made much of a difference, either. The faith stat is a possible exception because a high number here can help you dispose of vampires more easily, at least in theory. However, there are less than a handful of mandatory battles in the game and combat was unpredictable and tedious anyway, so it hardly mattered as much as it could have, either. The genre is really a hybrid in dumbing down the core elements – the tactical challenge of the RPG, the puzzles of the adventure game. 

In combat, Ransom always needs to stay alive so it's mostly the line-up of your party that's important, and their skills don't change or level up at all. It's possible to enhance your party members or yourself with cybernetic augmentations (and the revived cyborg Elvis is quite the tank) but again, this feels more like buying better equipment instead of character development through experience. However, I'm judging this game as an adventure game as opposed to an RPG, so it doesn't really factor into the PISSED rating. I just wanted to get it off my chest. 

Mother Mary the Minimalist

The inventory is easy to use but there are so incredibly many items in the game that it's even easier to lose track. Also, most of them can be useful in some way although few of them are vital for solving the game. After a while the game turns into a veritable scrollfest when you want to use an item or equip one of your characters. The inventory screen contains my least favourite interface of the game. 

You can outfit your party to suit your combat needs. Sometimes you need a badge or lapel to enter otherwise inaccessible locations (TransTech, the Inner Sanctum of the Hellfire Club). Also, one or two of the puzzles are construed around the equipment. The deck is like a secondary inventory for the cyberspace. You need to improve your deck to access the more sophisticated wells, and entering the final well is a deck "puzzle" in and of itself. Inventory and decking unit are often used in tandem to good results, my favourite example being the quest to retrieve parts of Charlie Flyer from the cyberspace in order to reunite them with his vegetating body. 

I don't really care for arbitrary time limits and hunger mechanics. This game has both and is all the more annoying for it. Fortunately, the time limit comes into play late in the game and it's possible to avoid it with a reasonably optimised run (which is rather typical for much older adventure games). The hunger (or rather, thirst) mechanic is toned down considerably when you figure out how to enter the secret club of vampire fetishists because they leave bottles of artificial blood lying around in the open. 3.

When the power runs out, we'll just hum

Story & Setting: 

This is where the game feels like an RPG rather than an adventure game. You talk to a lot of NPCs, receive a lot of quests, and many of them are optional. The amount of dialogue (as well as some other things) positively reminded me of Planescape: Torment which is one of my favourite games period. Another point of comparison with that paragon of a game is that many of the NPCs in BloodNet define themselves through their beliefs. Most conversations are wordy but brief, yet they manage to convey the feeling of a complex whole incorporating different outlooks on life that are often vastly incompatible with one another. It seems pertinent to differentiate between the overarching narrative and the smaller story elements. The overarching narrative is quite conventional and takes a turn for the irredeemably cheesy in the end. Many of the side quests and smaller story elements, however, are superb. Also, it's commendable that the game tries its hand at social commentary and although it's mostly quite heavy-handed the fact itself still manages to stand out in the context of a video game released in 1993.

There are some odds and ends. I may not call them plot holes but at some point you come close to figuring out that the Flux Riders are Van Helsing's hired henchmen and probably responsible for abducting Deirdre Tackett as well as smearing her apartment with blood (whose blood, by the way? The reunion with Deirdre leaves a lot to be desired, too). Shock Maraud, their leader, offers me to buy him out if I offer him something better than Van Helsing but it doesn't really work in the end (maybe it's a bug). He still sends his goons after me once the time limit is up. Also, recognising them as the kidnappers doesn't have any consequences at all. At some point I bit Maraud's whole gang to death but they were still able to come after me. There are lots of situations where BloodNet stumbles over its own ambitions but this one, being part of the main plot, was the most striking to me. Also, most of the early plot twists are nice (Sampson's betrayal, Zeus's true identity) but they became sillier as the game went on (Melissa's betrayal, Dracula being behind it all, Incubus taking over). 

I also liked that many of my actions and words had consequences in the game world. Sometimes I'd pick a dialogue option, recruit somebody or just do somebody's bidding and suddenly somebody else (often someone I'd never heard of up until then) was mad at me. I wouldn't say that was impressive but it was a nice touch. Also, cyberspace, while feeling like a different world altogether, is connected to the real world quite well. The "Zeus" plot in which an online bigmouth turned out to be a college student looking for help stood out in particular. 6.

"You mean, did you personally come and smear my floor with blood?"

Sound & Graphics:

The music consisted of farts and noises. I've heard better, I haven't heard much worse. Apparently, the Amiga music is nice. I turned it off very soon which I usually never do. The sound effects were nothing special and even quite retro for a 1993 game. The graphics of the game are odd. On the one hand many of them look really nice and the interfaces are clean and easy to read. However, the animated objects are placed in front of pre-rendered graphics which almost always looks iffy. The NPCs and party members as seen inside the rooms have nothing at all in common with their character portraits which is terribly confusing. Objects are black and white which is great for the puzzle category (no pixel hunting) but aesthetically it's another dubious decision. To add to this mess, the cinematics look very different from just about everything else in the game. I know that's kind of par for the course in 1993 but with this game I feel it is one style too many. There is just no coherence. I really think that it's mostly the aesthetics that drove people away from the game. They certainly help make the game feel unpolished and unfinished even. Usually, this is the least important category for me but if the graphics make a game more confusing than necessary, that's not cyberpunk. They're just not done very well. 3.

They make it work on some of the screens, admittedly.

Environment & Atmosphere:

The game manages to shine in this category despite the silly names and the uneven graphics and that is no small feat. It's easy to immerse yourself in the world of BloodNet and although many aspects of the game feel unpolished and simply too ambitious its atmosphere makes up for most of its shortcomings in creating a worthwhile playing experience. I will remember BloodNet fondly mostly because of this. 

The environment is defined by an interesting twist on the established (by 1993) cyberpunk pattern, adding vampirism to the mix. Although I was skeptical at first they really managed to make that work. Many American neo-noir films of the 1980s and early 1990s went down a similar road by infusing the tried genre with elements from other traditions – BloodNet adapts that principle to a video game and adds some horror to the likes of Neuromancer and Circuit's Edge. All things considered, this category must be the game's strongest suit: 8.

I don't like the way you look, but I like what you stand for.

Dialogue & Acting:

Here's the thing: if you can stomach the dialogue, it's quite good. You have to get past the stupid fourth wall breaking names like New Klee R. Wynter and accept that they were going for a very specific flavour here that's likely not to everybody's taste. Some, like "HoloGraham", could be considered so bad that they're almost good. If you can live with the game's writing style it's actually quite rewarding, offering lots of details (like a cyberpunk poem!) and nuanced storytelling, making the game world feel quite alive once you've managed to immerse yourself in it. 5.

I've noticed that I had a lot to say about the first three categories, and much less about the other three. I didn't run out of steam there, I just felt they were much easier to pinpoint. I'd like to add one bonus point for ambition but then I'd also have to deduce one point for overambition, so I'll just let it be. The final score is 47 which is much lower than I'd have expected at some point. Also, it doesn't quite reflect my enjoyment of the game but that comes down to two things: I thought about the puzzle category a lot because the game uses mostly RPG staples here. The meta puzzle, as I called it, works well for me and I do like the concept of games like Maupiti Island. I don't think, however, that it is intended that the puzzle category takes this into account. The question "How much did I enjoy the cognitive challenges of the game?" would probably net a 6 or 7. Also, I don't mind the graphics and I was fine with turning off the sound. I am certain that a lot of thought and time went into both, too. From an aesthetic point of view, however, they just don't work. The different layers just collide and - apart from a few really beautiful background graphics - look like a hot mess. If I were to calibrate the PISSED rating this would be less important, though, so my personal score for BloodNet would possibly around 50.

Compared to the other MicroProse adventure games we have played for the blog so far BloodNet can be found at the top of the list together with Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender (45 points). Return of the Phantom (41) and especially The Legacy: Realm of Terror (24), another adventure/RPG hybrid, both had lower scores. It will be interesting to compare the score for BloodNet with those for Veil of Darkness (final rating coming soon-ish) and Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller (coming up in 1994). Leo Vellés came closest by guessing 45 – felicidades, Leo!

So, what did we learn about BloodNet? All that ambition helped to make it a fascinating but not a great game. To me, it mostly overstayed its welcome and the endgame (including Grant's Tomb) didn't really work that well with its sudden spikes in difficulty and making combat a necessity where it had been a (neglectable) option before. Is it an adventure game? Sort of, but it doesn't manage to be a proper hybrid like Quest for Glory where both genres somehow add to the overall experience. It's more of a tortured hybrid where the creators were (understandably) fascinated with both genres and wanted to have the best of both worlds, ending up with a thoroughly fascinating failure. That said, I'd recommend playing BloodNet much, much sooner than playing your average, run-of-the-mill adventure game or RPG. Once you're past the initial confusion it does have its moments. If you're not a completionist it's perfectly reasonable to spend ten hours with it and then read all about how it ends on this blog. 

The CRPG Addict has previously played other Paragon games and evaluated BloodNet through that lens while I regarded them as Microprose (-developed, -published) adventure games. His choice of context is probably more accurate and he can discern a common theme, concluding that BloodNet was, "[a]s with most Paragon games, an interesting misfire". The Addict also evaluated that Ransom's skills at the end of the game were a bit different than those from the beginning, so there was some character development going on in the background. He agrees with me in that it really didn't make much of a difference, though. Now because of his different focus on the game (he goes into more detail about the skills because his blog is about CRPGs, naturally) I don't want to recap everything he had to say about the game. Please go read it yourself, it's really worth it.

However, I'm interested in the differences between our ratings although the systems are, again, naturally, not 100% compatible. He gave the game world a score of 7 which is rather compatible with my 6 for story and setting. As it's a mixed category in our case it's not entirely comparable, of course, but we both liked it rather than not. NPC Interaction may be closest to our Dialogue & Acting category. I gave it a 5, as did he. Now an RPG category for Equipment is not really the same as Inventory & Interface but it's possibly the closest fit. Chet agrees that BloodNet "offers too much", i.e. has too many items. He also agrees with me that the quests are in general of a high quality and that the side quests are more interesting than the main quest. My thoughts about the story (Story & Setting) are kind of comparable, and we both gave them a 6. The category Graphics, Sound, and Interface kind of mixed our categories of Interface & Inventory and Sound & Graphics but only kind of. Our interface category (as I see it) is more compatible with Chet's Gameplay category so it's safe to say that Chet ("I loved the scen graphics") enjoyed the aesthetics more than I did. If I loved any graphics in the game they were certainly scene graphics but the clash between graphic styles was just too blatant for me to get past it. I gave it a 3, he gave it a 4. While my Interface rating also seems lower than Chet's Gameplay category (6) I talked about several of his gameplay observations (nonlinearity, difficulty, pacing) in different categories, namely Story & Setting, and Puzzles & Solvability. 

Character Creation and Development (2), Encounters and Foes (3), Combat (4), and Economy (3) make much more sense as rating categories for an RPG. As a side note, I found that there were ample opportunities to spend your money right up until the end. But maybe Chet didn't suck as much at combat and didn't have to replace his gear and party members as often.

Alex Romanov was spot on with his guess of 42 for the GIMLET rating. Also, MorpheusKitami predicted that Chet would deduct some points, and he did (2). 

CAP Distribution

100 CAPs to Will Moczarski

• Blogger Award – 100 CAPs – For playing through BloodNet for everyone's enjoyment

50 CAPs to Morpheus Kitami

• Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – For playing through Urotsukidoji for everyone's enjoyment

15 CAPs to Vetinari

• The Riddler Award – 15 CAPs – For solving the gang puzzle, the cryptogram, and putting the Hard Metals first in order of machismo.

10 CAPs to Leo Vellés

• Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – For almost guessing the PISSED rating for BloodNet

10 CAPs to Michael

• Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – For almost guessing the PISSED rating for Urotsukidoji 

10 CAPs to Alex Romanov

• Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – For correctly guessing the GIMLET rating for BloodNet

5 CAPs to ShaddamIVth

• MoFo Legacy Award – 5 CAPs – For reading my rotten, lowdown mind

5 CAPs to Andy_Panthro

• Home Alone in Hell Award – 5 CAPs – For connecting McCalaster to Macaulay and DOOM to BloodNet

5 CAPs to Vince

• Consolation Price – 5 CAPs – For getting over his disappointment with Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets

Next up for me will be Pepper's Adventures in Time. I'm looking forward for a very different experience and a shorter game. It feels good to be back!