Vampire social RPG Cabernet uncorks the bottle this October

Party for Introverts has announced that their narrative vampire adventure, Cabernet, will arrive on October 24. It will be released on Steam.

In Cabernet, you play as a newly turned vampire who has to incorporate themselves into a bunch of aristocrats. They call it a narrative RPG, but I think they mean it’s more of a social RPG in the sense that you get to put points into four categories of snobbery and can leverage them in conversation. There are also transformations, and you can eat the rich. It’s pretty rad.

I previewed Cabernet over a year ago, and I dug it. It nails the worldbuilding, and the conversation system is pretty boss. My biggest concern was that this sort of game is deceptively ambitious. It takes a lot of planning to make a “choices matter” of this complexity. When you show a slice of the first hour-or-so of a game like this, it hasn’t even left the runway. After that, it becomes more sprawling and entangled, and it can be difficult to manage.

That doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, and Cabernet hasn’t actually given me a reason to believe it won’t. I’ve been surprised by a few games recently that have similarly taken on difficult formulas with success, so I’m hoping this will be another case of that.

We’ll all find out when Cabernet launches on PC October 24, 2024.