Review: Cabernet Lets You Make the Most of Life as a Vampire

I love when we get vampire games with a slower pace offer a more nuanced look at life as a supernatural being. The potential for destruction remains, of course, but it’s an opportunity for a more thoughtful consideration of how we’d get by as an undead forced to thrive on blood. Cabernet is one of those games, with Party for Introverts thrusting us into a new afterlife with no warning, asking us to make decisions that will affect us later, and requiring us to also continually better ourselves in the hopes of increasing our options for survival later.

Liza had a promising future. She was a doctor. She, depending on your choices, might have been a talented singer, thirst for knowledge, or charm needed to handle the politics of high society. But now she’s dead. After making some choices at her funeral that affect her starting stats, she awakens in the locked basement dungeon of the head vampire Countess Orlova. Forced to make a deal with an unknown figure to escape the room, pushed into undead society, and deal with new abilities and weaknesses, she needs to survive and thrive in her new life. However, she doesn’t know exactly how she died yet or who she made a deal with! And she’s also being tasked by her sire, who is known as the Doctor, to continue working as a physician and add to his research. 

Cabernet is essentially a vampire life sim, as we spend each day  in the game helping Liza get accustomed to her new life and complete tasks that ensure her success. This means you need to do things like read books and wearing outfits to ensure stats keep growing and get high enough to meet checks for certain actions and conversation options. You need to drink blood, referred to as Cabernet, either from humans, animals, or designated sources. Observing people and knowing what to say to them to stay on their good side is important. (Or I mean, maybe you want to do the opposite.) You need to know when to use your vampiric gifts like flight, invisibility, and captivating to get your way. Quests must be tracked in your log, so you’re both completing the necessary ones that advance the campaign and perhaps getting through optional ones to open up new invitations into homes or allies. 

It’s often quite interesting! However, your enjoyment might vary depending on your attachment to the characters around Liza. I found some of them fascinating. For example, I like Arban and Hussar a lot, and Alisa is interesting too. Yet there were also times when certain character portrayals meant others didn’t feel as complex as others. In my case, this mainly applied to humans, which left me wondering if it was intentional to force the player to pay more attention to their fellow undead. 

The thing is, while I liked the idea of living the vampire life as Liza, the major plot points sometimes struck me as a bit boring. There’s some intrigue here, to be sure. And perhaps it also came down to the choices I made when in her shoes. But finding out the truth behind her death didn’t feel like it carried much weight to “my” version of her, and the day-to-day actions and interactions entertained me more than finding out who left their mark on Liza or dealing with the Countess. 

Since this is a game where every choice matters and you’re supposed to live with the consequences your vampire tendencies cause, Cabernet doesn’t allow you to make save states. You start a run? That’s it. You’re locked into it. Don’t like the way you responded to the Doctor one time? Too bad, he doesn’t like you as much now. Didn’t realize a card minigame is rigged for you to lose when you first encounter it and you waste all your money trying to get 21? Whoops. It is possible immediately quit and go from the last auto-save, but that might be some time away, so I found it better to play as intended and live with my choices. 

I will say it would make it a little easier to do so if the UI was a bit  easier to parse. Especially when I played Cabernet on the Switch, as the first few sessions I’d forget that it would default to mouse-based cursor control in the menus, even though everything else relied upon a standard control scheme. I found it a bit easy to miss notifications that I’d earned enough experience to level up and add more points to my stats in my character sheet. Also, since the quest tracker is really only focusing on your major campaign ones, you may miss out if you aren’t checking the Quests section regularly. 

While I enjoyed Cabernet on the Switch, the menu control scheme wasn’t the only time I felt like this might not be the best platform for the vampire game. There’s a rhythm minigame of sorts, and it didn’t feel really comfortable to go through it on the platform. I also experienced two crashes during my time playing, which can be frustrating in a title where decisions matter and you might have made some gains that “day” that were now lost. 

Cabernet is one of the more unique vampire games I’ve played, and I enjoyed maintaining a balance of managing Liza’s life while also dealing with more pressing tasks. It helped that some of her new contemporaries are also quite personable and fascinating. I just wish that some of the major campaign elements, at least early on, were a little more thrilling or that the Switch version was better optimized for the console. 

Cabernet is available for the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC.