Not a revisit but first time experience. Apologies if my english sounds weird. I thought I'd post this here since I discovered this game only thanks to the Codex and its
top 70 RPGs list, which I am/was slowly working my way through. Bloodlines is sitting comfortably at #6, yet, to my shame, I've never really heard much about it before. I remember seeing the cover once in some old german gaming mag; that's it. It rarely seems to pop up in any discussions online or other meaningless "top x of all time" lists. Clearly, I must be frequenting the wrong forums. But the game looked intersting, so GOG + UP9.5 it was.
Well, it delivered! Within the first 2 hours I knew I would play it more than once, despite the obvious flaws, awkward cutscenes and sometimes frustrating combat. Doesn't matter. The last time I've been this obsessed with a game was back in the day with the original Deus Ex, and I'm kinda surprised that a game could still do this to me. Makes me feel like a kid again. It also looks much better than I expected of an old game like this, especially the characters. Had to think of the 3D Fallouts that came 4 years later and use basically the same dialogue system with NPCs staring awkwardly in your face. But while Fallout 3's characters all kinda look the same and expressionless, Bloodlines' characters look alive and colorful.
You could play this 10 years from now, and they would still look good. Might be the UP polishes them up a bit, but it can't make that much of a difference. Or maybe it does, how would I know?
I'm also digging the lore (had no prior experience with the VtM or WoD or whatever setting). Upholding the Masquerade and managing Humanity and blood isn't particularly challenging. But they serve as a constant reminder that I am in fact a monster and need to feed. Story felt like Game of Thrones with tits and vampires, just on a smaller scale, with the sarcophagus as the overarching MacGuffin. Up until the end I wasn't sure who I could trust and would have preferred to just nope the fuck out of LA. I wasn't convinced by any of the factions. Also loved the cab ride, great atmosphere. There were many good moments, but the one that stood out to me most was in the Asylum: "As I recall, he died with a smile on his face."
...
<- me staring at the screen for about 5 minutes
In my first ending the sarcophagus remained closed, which left me a bit unsatisfied. So I started a new game immediately, spent about 20 hours absorbing Malkavian dialogue and going insane, then opened the damn thing myself. ... I sHoUlD hAvE lIsTeNeD tO tHe VoIcEs iN mY hEaD! They told me there'd be "death" inside. It's a common trope that rumors and myths in game stories always turn out to be true, so I didn't expect this. Also, what a great way to increase replayability! I've never seen insanity, as an optional trait, done like this before. Maybe playing a low INT character in Fallout comes close, but iirc you'd also miss a lot of content.
At that point, I thought I was done with this game. Time to move on to the next... But then some odd case of "post-game depression" kicked in and I had absolutely zero interest in other games. A week later I finally caved in and started a third playthrough as Tremere. Tried to do everything differently, and was surprised at how much dialogue I'd missed before. That was, again, over a week ago, and I still have no desire to move on to other games. Just writing this made me realize, that a Nosferatu playthrough is inevitable.
tl;dr
Game raped me.
Thanks for the top 70 list, I guess.
PS:
Best elevator music.
! As far as I know nobody involved in the Prelude even played WoD PnP, so we will stick close to what we learned from Bloodlines instead of making something up which would break canon and probably anger every fan out there even more than Bloodlines itself 
. Also the sarcophagus setup will only be the main background story with other stuff going on at the same time...
