IX: Cabernet

Recommended by: my partner Lexi

Cabernet is a 2025...visual novel? I guess? It's tagged "Adventure, RPG, Vampire, Female Protagonist" on Steam which doesn't really say much. Why is it that as I write more of these posts I struggle more and more to even pin games to genres? I mean I guess it's interactive fiction definitionally because that's what those words mean but that invokes games like Andrew Plotkin's and this is nothing like that; how long can this intro paragraph digression even go? from two-person indie studio Party for Introverts, which has made three "short interactive stories" before this and then this, billed as their "first full-length project" on their website. It stars Liza, a recently-awakened vampire, in Fantasy 19th Centure Europe, and tells the story of her attempts to figure out how she died, who brought her back and why, and how to live in her new world.

My introduction to this game was the partner who recommended it scrolling through Steam, seeing it on sale, saying roughly "oh this looks great", and buying it just to support it. I then didn't think about it again until they said it was making them cry and asked if I was going to play it / if I minded the spoilers, and I said oh, I'm never going to play it, spoil away. I then got it as their 12-in-12 choice: Probably the only game that I really liked in the last 3 years you haven't also played or watched me play, hahah, having not only forgotten what the spoiler was but having forgotten the fact that they'd spoiled anything at all until getting to that part of the game and saying "oh right this was that thing Lexi told me about" and crying.

Cabernet is a pretty typical "schedule your time wisely" adventure game structurally. You get three Actions That Pass Time™ a day, there's a calendar that tells you exactly when the next big main story beat will happen (this usually corresponds with a chapter ending), and you can just work backwards to "okay I get to do 12 things before the next chapter". The game will very rarely throw a wrench in this, where oops suddenly this character is on vacation for two months; the only character with a real schedule tells you outright "my school is open these days of the week" and pretty much everyone else is only ever gated by "do you meet the stat requirements to do this thing?", a very common visual novel design space. You have four stats: history/politics, literature, science/logic, and arts/music, as well as a blue ~~paragon~~ humanity bar and a red ~~renegade~~ nihilism bar which increase by doing broadly ""good"" or ""bad"" things. (As with basically every game with any sort of morality system, this is vibes; the game doesn't track things like "oh, you took this money out of the house of Countess McDuck to feed someone who was starving", it just knows "you stole money", so if you're like me, you'll probably find at least a few places where this leads to a bit of mechanical friction.) This occasionally extends into the metagame: I got the achievement for "lie to a character" for refusing to tell someone something that would have gotten them killed, and "use your vampire powers for selfish reasons" for hypnotizing someone into freeing me from jail, which was required by the plot. This felt tonally...off, but I've also basically never gotten along with games with morality systems if I think about them too hard, so I'm not very surprised.

A lot of the above ends up being mostly moot: I ended the game with nine spare days and four out of fourteen sidequests un-done: two because I never got enough nihilism points to start them, the third because I never got enough nihilism points to start it and absolutely hated the character involved, and the fourth because there are three ways to make money in this game, one of which is "do jobs for the character mentioned in quest three", and I ended the game with, quite literally, zero coins, which was unsurprisingly not the twelve coins I needed for the very last step of buying the character who jumpscared me by being voiced by Brian David Gilbert the thing he needed. There's an achievement for maxing out both morality bars, so that's definitely possible to do, as is savescumming the blackjack minigame the second that it unlocks to make exponentially increasing amounts of money by going double-or-nothing and loading if you lose and then never thinking about money again. (Would that it were that easy in real life.) With a pinch of foreknowledge and a bit more than a pinch of "willing to be an asshole", I could have easily hit every sidequest with time to spare, and I also finished the game with every primary stat higher than the hardest check that used them.

All of this is to say that Cabernet is fairly uninterested in being, say, Pathologic, or even really Persona. It doesn't particularly want to give you an incredibly tight schedule that you can't possibly fill out, because it doesn't particularly want you to miss story beats just because you didn't read enough books for stat points five chapters ago. (I'm pretty sure you get enough science points from just doing the town doctor's sidequest chain for every science check in the game?) The end result of this is that the game, for the most part, just feels like a cozy way to tell stories about Liza and her interactions with the world. (Foreshadowing is a literary device in which)

The sidequests are heavily siloed and individually themed: Arban doesn't know who turned her into a vampire and wants to look for them, so she gets all of the biological vs chosen family themes. Trofim is a mortal servant to an immortal, watching himself get older as everyone around him stays the same age, so he gets all of the "value of a life" themes. There's the "failing marriage" couple, the misunderstood child of someone extremely powerful, the person watching themselves get slowly corrupted by power, and the pair of revolutionaries who argue over the means and methods of revolution. (The writing around these two is...somewhat indelicate, but "where on the axis of 'revolution at by any means and at any cost' to 'revolution within the constraints of existing structures' do you sit?" is a praxis question that's nuanced enough that you can spend multiple books on it, and I don't really think this game had a chance.) Want Liza to be straight? Cool. Want her to be a lesbian? Cool. The game will let you partake of what you want and to avoid partaking of most things you don't want, tell your own story, live your own life.

This, then, makes the incredibly un-cozy hard vibes turn of the endgame feel really unfortunate. It's difficult to write about without just explicitly spoiling much of the ending, but suffice to say that it feels like the writers remembered that vampire stories often have more explicit horror elements and needed to start taking some absolutely wild plot swings in the name of raising the stakes and making the game more horrific. The shift from "I don't like Character X because he's a one-dimensional conman" to "I don't like Character Y because they're trying to do a genocide via eugenics" took...maybe thirty in-game lines of dialog? The endgame escalates almost aggressively quickly, and it just...did not need that, in any way, I think. I don't really know how I think that the game should have ended...but I do know that I think it didn't need to take a detour through all of the places that it did, and that not every story needs dire stakes for excitement.

Despite the tonal inconsistency, I do think that there's a whole lot of love in the writing of Cabernet. When it works, it really works, and it's mostly a really solid exploration of some tough/heavy themes. I just, well, also think it would have been a better story if it were about half an hour shorter? Your mileage, as always, may vary.