Vampyr is an action RPG from DontNod, the folks that brought us the beloved Life is Strange. It’s a game with overwhelming potential: A combat system that mostly works because of how well it ties into the RPG mechanics, but is held back by poor encounter design; a once-surely-sleek traversal system that feels all but gutted; random load times in the middle of combat sequences.

Vampyr excels in using a distinct and diverse cast to flesh out a world and a worldview. It is operating on a smaller scope than your standard globetrotting Western RPG. Not a sprawling gorgeous galaxy, but a dense, dirty city.

In plague-ridden London, 1918, you play as Jonathan Reid, a doctor from a wealthy family who becomes a vampire. Bitten, but by whom? His first act of hunger is to unknowingly feed on his sister. He stumbles through a tutorial to find himself the newest practitioner at Pembroke Hospital, where the head doctor has taken a particular interest in his kind. The game is a healthcare management sim, where you learn about the inhabitants of the hospital and other districts, solve problems and provide them with care.

It is not the pulpy trudge through Vampyr’s core mystery that speaks to me, but what the game spends the most hours on, the plight of immigrants and the class struggles of the citizens. Jonathan is power incarnate. How to use that power and the resulting consequences drive the game‘s biggest question: Who deserves care and who deserves death?

These questions are the players to answer through the game. You decide who stays sick, who gets better, and who dies. You are Jonathan Reid, the great arbiter of healthcare and you are very explicitly playing an empathy game. Vampyr is almost prohibitively difficult unless you feed on citizens. The result is rewarding as a game system but undercuts what could have been a core criticism of the systemic issues prevalent in healthcare.

Throughout the game, the limiting factor in keeping communities healthy is resources. Can you supply, through combat and exploration and crafting, enough materials to create the medicine your patients need so badly? That is the single restrictor in Vampyr, but reality is much more complicated than resource management.

The problem is not that games cannot translate real-world issues into readable mechanics, but Vampyr communicates so much with its systems that when it tells the player “we don’t have enough resources to cure everyone” it falls on deaf ears to an audience primed to believe otherwise. By focusing on immigrants, organizers, and income disparity, Vampyr’s cast of characters lays the thematic groundwork for capitalist critique that the systems don’t quite back up.

In the early 1900s, England saw an influx of immigrants due to the fallout of Eastern European revolutions. Hundreds of thousands fled from Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Many were Jewish, a result of post-war religious persecution. Chinese and Indian immigrants made up a much smaller, but still notable, population.

Vampyr replicates this, creating believably diverse and tight-knit communities, highlighting the poor and hungry immigrant working class as the game’s main NPCs and succeeding in building a city full of sympathetic, morally complex human beings. There is a period appropriate diversity that creates authenticity and lays the groundwork for a richness of character. So often, the game defines characters, not by what they lack, but what they still have and the action they take to regain what they’ve lost.

As you uncover clues about each NPC by engaging in dialogue across the city, first impressions come quick and subverted even quicker. Giselle Paxton is one of many residents of the docks who shows a distrust of Jonathan, of his status, of his profession, of his appearance. Her initial hostility was soon offset by my learning of her work with a local trade union, a fact that forever endeared me to Giselle.

The first journey outside of Pembroke takes the player to Whitechapel and focuses on a group of immigrants whom you discover to be secretly distributing medicine to those who can’t afford care. The grassroots movement is led by Dorothy Crane, a Romanian immigrant. She is a nurse at Pembroke who is stealing supplies. Darius Petrescu is the second in command, another Romanian who has roots in communist activism in his home country.