Image credit: Bithell Games

Bithell Games - the developer of Tron: Catalyst, John Wick Hex and Thomas Was Alone - has revealed a new minimalist immersive vampire sim called Vampirium: 1997.

Catchily, it styles you as an assassin working for the King of England, who is also Dracula. "At his command, master your dark gifts to assassinate his enemies and secure his vampiric empire," the game's blurb reads. "Infiltrate locked-down locations, adapt and survive in living environments and uncover your own unique methods of executing missions."

From a gameplay point of view, Vampirium: 1997 plays out from an abstracted, top-down, tactical perspective. You see blueprint layouts of buildings and dots where other people are. When you interact with something like, say, a room, an interaction window pops up with various choices you can make while there. Do you want to turn a light switch off? Do you want to try and take out a guard? These are the various kinds of options you'll find there.

Watch on YouTube

Central to all of this is the game's use - and your use - of time. You'll have to manage it carefully by moving time forwards fractionally to achieve things, but not too much that you put yourself in danger. This is all done using a clock in the bottom corner of the screen. Problematically, though, some actions you wish to carry out will have an associated time cost. Do you dare risk them?

An eight-minute gameplay walkthrough of Vampirium: 1997 narrated by Bithell Games' founder, Mike Bithell, shows this in action. To my eye, it looks like a dense sandbox rich with possibilities for approaching situations in various ways. There aren't many showy graphical flourishes, but there are dialogue interactions with character art.

Bithell Games has had a rough time of it recently: the studio had to lay-off the majority of its staff nearly a year ago, following its failure to secure a new larger scale project after Tron: Catalyst. Tron: Catalyst was released in June 2025, and scored well on Eurogamer, earning four stars in our review. It's not clear how many people are making this new game, Vampirium: 1997, but it could be only Mike Bithell himself. "Developed on my Mac, and Steam Deck compatible already with hardware specific settings /controls (60fps, natch)," Bithell wrote on Bluesky in response to a comment about platform compatibility.

Vampirium: 1997 is scheduled for an early access release at some point - the date is to be announced - and there's a novella called The Last Portrait being released chapter by chapter as development rolls on.

Mentioned in this article

See 1 more