Either Paradox, who these days own Vampire: The Masquerade & World of Darkness publisher White Wolf, are getting into the Netflix & Chill game, or they’re they’re gearing up to reveal a long-awaited follow-up to the legendary Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

They’ve come up with Tender, ostensibly a dating site. Whose metadata just so happens to read “Whether you’re looking for meaningful friendships, true love or simply a late night bite with a kindred spirit, Tender is here to help.”

By the pricking of my thumbs…

I signed up nervously for Tender, readying my desperate justifications should my partner walk in and find me creating an online dating profile while she exhaustedly hauled our e’er-vomiting baby around the house. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Tender became less about strangers honking each other’s pud, and more about nihilism, hobbies including demonology and status updates about eating cats.

As far as I can tell, there’s currently no way to actually communicate with or otherwise progress a relationship with another horny/bloodthirsty soul, outside of being able to choose canned lines approving of their statuses, but that this is a) clearly an alternate reality game and b) is tagged beta and talks about new features coming soon, Satan only knows what it’s got in store for us.

Here’s my auto-generated profile description, after I picked interests including board games and murderers:

Definitely, definitely about boning, and nothing to do with videogames about increasingly corrupted immortal souls, I’m sure you’ll agree.

I’ve done a little burrowing into Tender’s source code, and turned up a few more nuggets of note. First, here’s a video which plays once you’ve completed the initial round of profile-setting tasks and a few short quizzes about e.g. Robert Plutchik’s emotional wheel.



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You try and convince me that, for one thing, it isn’t deeply sinister, and for another that the closing music doesn’t positively scream vampires.

My digging also turned up mention of someone named ‘Alice & Smith’ as being responsible for some of these videos. Who, whaddaya know, turn out to be a Canadian developer which specialises in ARGs, including the John Walker-approved The Black Watchmen.

All this means more Vampire: The Masquerade, or I’ll eat my ancient boxed copy of Bloodlines (if I can be bothered to dig it up from the attic). But what form will it take, who’s making it and when we will find out more? Also, when will I get a booty call from an anonymous cat-eater?