I’m definitely getting some Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines vibes here, but Dark, while a very ominous game, comes from German developer Kalypso Media. They’re not really known for games outside of their Tropico or various other sim games, so this is quite the departure from their usual fare.

The game shares a lot of similarities with Vampire: TMB, I’ll touch on a few. Blood is essentially mana, it feeds your powers and it also feeds you. The game heavily invests in a skill tree, meaning you can really choose how you want to play. The game also focuses on your powers interacting with both the living and the dead, meaning you can eventually overpower your adversaries more easily depending on how clever you are with your skills.

The game also focuses on the protagonist being a newly turned vampire, meaning you’ll be learning the ropes and adjusting to your new-found life in the dark. The various skills you learn seem to be focused on stealth-oriented sections of gameplay, but it seems the demos that have been shown so far have been of the same areas, so we’ll see how the rest of the game develops.

Dark launches on July 5th for $39.99 on Steam and July 9th $49.99 on Xbox 360. Could this game live up to Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines’ legacy? Probably not, but let’s see.