Because Everyone Needs a Transfusion of Blood Omen

Because Everyone Needs a Transfusion of Blood Omen

Raising Kain.

When Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain debuted for the original PlayStation 30 years ago, it defied expectations. The game didn’t push the boundaries of technology with its top-down 2D bitmap graphics and traditional action-RPG gameplay, but its tone and atmosphere felt like nothing anyone had ever seen before on consoles. Set in a bleak world called Nosgoth in which evil forces ran rampant and subjugated the living, players took the role of Kain, a man cursed with vampirism and betrayed by his allies.

Blood Omen was not a heroic tale. Players did not perform selfless acts for the good of society. And while Kain’s mission did place him in opposition to undead warlords and other cruel hatemongers, nothing about his crusade came from a noble place. Kain wanted revenge, pure and simple, and he found that his curse forced him to constantly feed on the blood of the living—which he did unflinchingly and with growing relish as his vampiric powers increased. Blood Omen follows Kain’s blood-soaked mission of hatred and vengeance, forcing players to do terrible things in order to take down even more murderous villains than Kain. But the writing in the game and its sublime voice acting somehow made those things seem... well, maybe not justified, but certainly less wanton and cruel than they might have appeared otherwise.

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain turned into a minor hit for its creators, wowing PlayStation audiences by bringing the sort of unflinching brutality you’d normally only find in a PC title to the realm of consoles, where the licensing and content restrictions of manufacturers had traditionally kept things lighter, frothier, and more kid-friendly. Like a lot of early PlayStation releases, Blood Omen presented a clear demarcation from what had come before and helped set expectations for gaming’s future. And that future, as it happened, included a fair number of Blood Omen sequels.

However, a proper, numbered sequel to Blood Omen—Blood Omen 2—wouldn’t actually arrive until 2002. The initial follow-up to Blood Omen, 1999’s Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, switched the series’ narrative focus to a younger vampire named Raziel, a daring choice. Not daring so much in changing the point-of-view character to a new hero, but more in the way it extrapolated Kain’s personal arc as a villainous one. Turns out all the stuff players had to do to win in Blood Omen really was as bad as it seemed, and Soul Reaver established as canon the fact that Kain chose to become a tyrannical vampire demigod rather than the savior of the world, ushering in the near-extinction of humankind. Raziel, a trusted lieutenant under Kain, provoked his master’s jealousy and found himself cast down and betrayed in much the same way Kain had been in the original Blood Omen, which set him along another tale of revenge... though, to be fair, one less defined by cruelty than Kain’s.

Blood Omen 2 follows immediately upon the events of the second Soul Reaver game... but also before the events of the first Soul Reaver game. Confused? Well, the Legacy of Kain series involves a lot of time travel. This sort of thing is simply to be expected.

Blood Omen 2 is both a sequel to the original Blood Omen and a prequel to Soul Reaver, a glimpse into an alternate reality that emerged from the events of Soul Reaver 2. It follows Kain’s new path as he celebrates his triumph in the first Blood Omen only to find that his choices at the Pillars of Nosgoth set events into motion that would spell the end of the vampiric race—a radically different status quo than seen in the Soul Reaver games.

Gameplay-wise, Blood Omen 2 has more in common with the Soul Reaver games than with the first Blood Omen. It makes use of fully immersive 3D graphics, as you’d expect from a PlayStation 2 game, and has a meatier, more complex control scheme, which empowers Kain to perform more complex feats and wield a greater variety of skills. The game places a heavy focus on pure action and rewards improvisation: Kain’s weapons suffer from degradation effects, forcing you to conserve your best swords or else come to terms with alternate combat techniques.

Both Blood Omen games are available for preorder from Limited Run through July 5, exclusively for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. You can order Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2 individually or as a special Deluxe Edition that comes in a slipcase and Steelcase. Either way, expect a lot of vampires and a lot of unsettling moral choices....