Music Week continues with Bertie meeting a composer whose work had a powerful effect on him, and whose processes aren't at all what he expected.

What is it about the music in Vampyr that appeals to me so much? I've played plenty of games with great music but this was the first to really make me think about it, to listen, to contemplate, to wonder. Maybe it's the loneliness of the cello. There's a powerful melancholy and almost yearning quality to it, in the way the bow sweeps the strings and makes that rasping, sonorous wave of noise; in and out, the sound lapping at your attention. And within it, there's a sense of aching. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be Jonathan Reid, the vampire, alone on the streets of 1918 London. Alone while coming to terms with what he is, what this world is, and where he fits within it.

Not only do I love the sound and the associations of it, I love the confidence I picture behind it. A confidence to do things differently, to strip everything back and just present a naked sound. No orchestra, no overt demonstration of musical power, no insecurity fuelling a need to impress. Instead, a cello. A cello played almost improvisationally, with scraps of melody moving irregularly as if on a whim. A cello not afraid to be ugly, to squeak by being played on the bridge. Who does that? Who commands someone to make those sounds for a game and knows they will be OK, that they will be enough?

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A new month means a new Humble Choice offering - and this has to be one of the more tempting ones we've seen for some time.

Members of Humble's gaming subscription service can get 12 games to keep forever this month, including Vampyr, Wargroove, Call of Cthulhu, Hello Neighbour and more for just £10/$12.

Dontnod's Vampyr is quite a good draw here as it hasn't been discounted this low until now. You will find it for under £10 on its own on the PSN Store right now, though.

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Focus Interactive has confirmed Vampyr's afore-promised patch to "de-emphasise" combat in the vampire action-RPG will release later this week on 26th September 2018.

"Story Mode de-emphasizes combat, placing a greater focus on narrative so players can enjoy Dr. Jonathan Reid's journey with less challenging gameplay," states an update on Steam.

"On the other end of the scale, Hard Mode makes combat much more difficult. Players will receive less experience from killing enemies too, forcing them to rely even more on embracing citizens to grow in power. Upon starting a new game, players will be given the option to choose from these two new modes or a third 'Normal Mode' if they wish to play the original Vampyr experience."

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Great Gothic horror is all about colour, or lack thereof. The black of night, the white of bone, the monochrome of a gloomy cobblestoned street illuminated dimly by a single paraffin lamp. When colour is used, it's to highlight scenes of the macabre and the morbid so beloved by penny dreadfuls - the yellowing of a lonely mouldering corpse, the fetid green bile of a plague victim, or a single bright glob of crimson gore. Where it should never exist is within the realms of beige.

Vampyr is an action RPG that attempts to get right back to the roots of great Gothic horror in a medium that is often criminally lacking. Jonathan Reid is a renowned doctor specialising in blood transfusions - what else? - and serves as a military doctor in the Great War before being attacked on a London street one night by an unknown assailant and transformed into a newborn vampire. Who his Maker is, no-one can say, but soon Reid is embroiled in a plot to find the source of the sickness and figure out why a bunch of secret mystical orders are suddenly making a reappearance.

The set-up is rushed through in an angst-ridden prologue that places you in the aftermath of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which at its height claimed millions of lives. In the midst of all that, when bodies lined the streets and fear and chaos gripped the nation's capital, who'd notice the absence of a lonely Whitechapel shopkeeper, a vicious Dockland gang-leader, a friendly West End grave-robber? It's buffet season for the immortal undead, but as a man once sworn to do no harm, will you partake?

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Disease has always been joined at the hip to superstition and fantasy - the term "influenza" once referred to the influence of unfriendly stars - but there's something especially, horribly otherworldly about the flu epidemic of 1918-1920, which claimed over 50 million lives. Invisible to the microscopes of the era, the Spanish flu was a phantom terror, its spread censored to shore up morale in the closing stages of the Great War. Where other outbreaks had ravaged children and the elderly, this one bizarrely reserved its worst excesses for hearty young adults: its effects included "cytokine storms" that turned stronger immune systems against themselves, drowning the afflicted in their own bodily fluids. With no cure forthcoming, many sufferers fell back on folk remedies and occult treatments, lining their nostrils with salt, tying ribbons to their arms and burning brown sugar or sulfur to chase away evil miasmas. It's from this tangle of science and myth, monsters of the imagination versus the monsters of the laboratory, that Dontnod's long-in-development Vampyr takes its cue.

Vampyr is an odd beast, the kind of cheesy yet high-concept fare Dontnod seems to specialise in, but its appeal and potential shortcomings are easy to summarise: it's one kind of game eating another kind of game alive, a third-person RPG-brawler with its fangs sunk into the neck of an open-ended, dialogue-driven adventure game. Brooding, hirsute protagonist Jonathan Reid is boss doctor at a London hospital in 1918, charged with the well-being of 60 fully fleshed-out civilian characters, from flu patients and recovering soldiers to the crooks, shopkeepers, scholars and charlatans in the pubs and alleyways beyond. He's also, however, a closet vampire who spends his leisure hours duffing up would-be Van Helsings and other, less sociable varieties of undead, and he needs plenty of blood to unlock and improve his abilities.

You'll steal a few mouthfuls of gore from opponents in combat, all of whom appear to be generic characters that can be slain with impunity, but the most bountiful sources are the civilians in your care. It creates a rather dramatic conflict of interest - and a potent balance of player priorities, with the consequences writ large both in the number of plot threads available and the ambience of this region-based open world. Are you just another mindless plague in a plagued city, reducing hard-up districts to flame-licked wastelands devoid of friendly presences, tearing the very narrative fabric of the game apart as you thin out London's ailing society? Or will you try to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving, or even do without those precious level-ups entirely?

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Supernatural adventure slash role-player Vampyr will take flight on 5th June, developer Dontnod has announced.

Vampyr is the first game to come from Dontnod since the original series of Life is Strange debuted back in 2015.

Originally due for launch late last year, Vampyr was pushed back to "spring 2018" last September.

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