Go for the Castle — if you can survive it
The Blood of Dawnwalker hands you a weirdly generous sandbox: after the opening prologue you can wander straight to the big bad’s front door and try to kill him. Rebel Wolves’ lead mission designer says the game doesn’t lock you into the usual fetch-quest treadmill — skilled or stubborn players can attempt to end the whole campaign early.
That said, this isn’t a welcome-mat situation. The fights against Brencis (the top vampire) and his lieutenants are deliberately brutal. The team wants to make sure that sprinting for the final showdown feels like a proper challenge, not a speedrun tutorial. So yes, you can try — but the game pushes back.
The way Dawnwalker is built makes that risky but fascinating. You’ve got a 30-day in-game clock that advances based on what you do rather than real-world time. You can chip away at Brencis by hunting his officers, but taking them out changes the world: enemies get more aggressive, the city may be sealed off, and Coen (your character) will become a higher-priority target. Those decisions open and close paths in a way that rewards creativity and punishes tunnel vision.
Why this matters (and when you can play)
For players this is a juicy design choice. It gives speedrunners, challenge-seekers, and creative playstyles a legit shot at rewriting the story, while still keeping consequences meaningful. The comparison to Breath of the Wild’s Ganon rush and Crackdown’s “remove the bosses” loop is fair — Dawnwalker is built to let weird runs happen and still make them interesting.
Rebel Wolves is the Polish studio formed by people who worked on big RPGs — including Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz from The Witcher 3 — so the pedigree is part of the buzz. The lead mission designer’s comments come from developer interviews, so treat them as the team’s plan rather than sealed fate. They expect that a subset of players will manage the early kill with enough patience and skill, possibly right after launch.
The Blood of Dawnwalker releases on September 3 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Recommended PC specs are already published and there’s a deluxe collector’s edition priced around €200 with a pile of physical and digital extras. If you like games that let you break the intended order and still make you pay for it, keep this one on your radar.
