During our 2021 Spooptober celebration, I took some time to muse over Vampyr’s Dr. Reid and his many musings about his vampiric thirst for blood. Put briefly, I felt that it overstayed its welcome past the game’s opening hours, turning first from understandable to annoying and finally to kind of ludicrous. I even went so far as to say that it kind of undercut the story’s drama and Dr. Reid’s gravitas as a character. But, was that truly a fair take? Perhaps, perhaps not.
To come right out with it, no, Dr. Reid’s (very) frequent thoughts about his thirst for blood aren’t enough to pull the drama out of the story. They can certainly make you laugh in the moment, but the story still unfolds with the proper weight. Yeah, a bit of unintentional levity is not nearly enough to cut through the VERY thick somber atmosphere DontNod crafted within Vampyr.
As for Dr. Reid, he’s every bit the professional doctor you’d expect given his history. He was a highly respected physician before he shipped out to go to war, and you could say that his experiences in the front line field hospitals of WW1 pushed that professional part of his personality to an extreme, perhaps as a means to cope with what he saw there. This is very much an asset to the character in the game’s more serious moments, the ones that call for cold rationality.
However, whether you’re following the good route or the evil one, this attitude can get in the way at times. See, no matter what’s going on around him or whatever issue he’s dealing with, Dr. Reid never really gets away from that very professional, very neutral, doctorish tone. Be it grief, anger, relief, regret, or disgust Dr. Reid sounds about the same expressing all of them at the story’s outset , and he sounds the exact same at its conclusion.
I think that might be the key to what made the “I have this…thirst for blood.” line so funny after a while. He doesn’t sound disgusted so much as he’s trying to sound like he is. And it’s the same in situations when he should be terribly sad, angry, really frustrated or doing his utmost to talk someone off the proverbial ledge or convince them to become an ally. And once you notice it, it’s very hard to stop.
Again, it’s not enough to ruin the story or Dr. Reid himself. I mean, you could totally explain his odd disconnectedness as the result of everything that’s happened to him so far. He’s from a posh family, trained as a doctor, saw combat, saw death en masse from both wounds and disease, was killed himself and now exists as an undead who’s struggling (and possibly failing) to keep his morals and sense of self in the aftermath. It may simply be that his identity as a doctor is what he’s clinging to avoid becoming a monster.
Still, the mismatch in attitude in so many scenes can make for some top-quality spoop. It’s just a matter of what your own mood is like at the time. If you’re all in on the drama, then his personality could very well make perfect sense. If you’re there for cool vampire action and period drama camp, then perhaps the good doctor’s odd reactions with get a laugh or two out of you instead. Either way, he’s a fun character to follow, so give Vampyr a try if you haven’t already.
Have you ever played Vampyr? How did you feel about Dr. Reid? What’s another character that you felt had a tendency to behave strangely?
Image by TheDuckOfIndeed and Hatm0nster