Vampire: The Masquerade Swansong Cheats and Tips
Explore Everything And Pack A Notebook
Early on, Scenes in Swansong can get rather long. They often hit the multiple-hour mark, and your journal is pretty darn useless. Nothing is recorded, and you have to pay attention to everything if you want to make progress. On a basic level, this could mean reading documents and uncovering secrets with your intuition.
How about noticing a strange set of posters on a wall, or a set of books on a shelf in an unusual order. Nearly everything in Swansong can be opened, unlocked, or hacked, without using skills. You can even finish Scenes in multiple ways. You can find hints everywhere – you just have to look for them.
Once you think you’ve found something, you still have to make the connections. Often there will be multiple pieces to a puzzle, and manually figuring out how everything fits together is a major part of the game. Because of this, you are going to need a notebook to jot down potential PINs and safe combinations.
Don’t Neglect Your Disciplines
There are two ways to power up your characters in Swansong. You can increase your stats, or you can enhance your disciplines. Your stats directly influence your ability to communicate and interact with the world. These are things like Persuasion or Technology. They can even be Knowledge-based, like an affinity for Deduction.
These all seem like useful abilities that you should be focusing on, but that leaves you neglecting your Disciplines. These are the vampiric powers that allow you to bend reality, minds, and even time. You can get through the game without investing heavily into them, but you’d be missing out.
Leysha can perfectly imitate characters using Doppelganger. Emem can use Auspex to trace the memories of an object or see visions of the future. Galeb can Dominate people’s minds, and force them to do his bidding – overcoming any conversational stat checks. This is just a small taste of what you can do, so don’t overlook them.
Don’t Be Afraid To Use Your Resources
Swansong has two major resources: Willpower and Hunger. They both serve fairly similar roles but interact with different abilities. Willpower influences your ability to hack, lockpick, or persuade. Hunger on the other hand dictates how many times you can make use of your vampiric powers. Both are limited, but both are essential to your success.
Using Willpower, you can bypass the need to find a PIN to a safe or to elevate your natural ability to communicate. This can open doors, or reveal information that would otherwise be hidden from the player. They can also help you get through levels faster if you don’t want to mess around with key hunting.
Hunger fills as you use your abilities, and abusing them can leave you without an out when it comes to fulfilling your objectives. Unlike Willpower, however, Hunger is easily replenished by feeding, and most Scenes have plenty of opportunities to do just that. Your resources are always limited, but never to the point of being starved.
Keep Your Hunger Levels Low When Finishing A Level
One thing you should get into the habit of is keeping your Hunger low when you are about to go through a point of no return. These can be at the end of a level, or sometimes in the middle of one. In either case, you want to go for a last-minute feed to keep you topped up.
There are several instances where having low Hunger will open up additional options between transitions, and these can sometimes have serious implications on the plot. Stay fed at the end, and you won’t have any issues. Go in hungry, and things could go spectacularly wrong.
