Game Review: BloodNet - A Cyberpunk Gothic

Manhattan, 2094. Megacorporations own the infrastructure, vampires own the night, and you're somewhere in between — which is not a comfortable place to be. BloodNet is a MicroProse RPG that nobody quite knew how to categorise at the time.

 

Part point-and-click adventure, part tactical RPG, part cyberspace crawler. Contemporary reviewers kept reaching for Shadowrun comparisons because there wasn't much else to reach for. The closest thing that exists to it now is probably the early Deus Ex, or Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines, except BloodNet got there first and with considerably less budget. You play Ransom Stark — decker, freelancer, and recent involuntary vampire. The bite came from Abraham Van Helsing, who in this universe is the head of a vampire syndicate with designs on Manhattan's entire cyberspace infrastructure. The only thing keeping Stark functional and human-adjacent is a prototype neural implant, designed by Deirdre Tackett, grafted onto his brain stem. It's keeping the infection at bay. It won't last forever.

The game splits between two worlds: the physical streets of Manhattan, navigated through point-and-click investigation and dialogue, and Cyberspace — a network of "wells" you travel between using codewords, abstract and hostile.

You build a party along the way: rage gangers, hackers, mercenaries, all with their own stats and tendencies. The AI has them volunteering for jobs and reacting to your choices, which for 1993 is quietly impressive. What actually keeps people talking about it isn't the mechanics — those are clunky, the combat is frustrating, and the game gives you very little directional help. What keeps people talking is the atmosphere. Pre-rendered backgrounds, hand-drawn character portraits with no consistent style, a MIDI soundtrack that sits somewhere between industrial and wrong. It shouldn't cohere.

 

Somehow it does — or rather, it coheres in the way a fever dream coheres: internally consistent, completely unplaceable. It's a difficult game that still doesn't hold your hand, still doesn't explain itself, and still manages to get under your skin in a way that most games with twice the budget never do.

You can find it basically for nothing on GOG and Steam.