Dracula Is King of England. You're His Hitman.

"Dracula demands results; the details are yours to figure out."

That's the pitch for Vampirium: 1997, a new minimalist immersive sim from Bithell Games, the studio behind Tron: Catalyst, John Wick Hex, and Thomas Was Alone. The premise is absurd in the best possible way: Dracula rules England, you're a descendant of his empire, and your job is to eliminate anyone who threatens the throne. Think Hitman by way of Bram Stoker, stripped down to blueprint layouts and tile-based interactions.

Mike Bithell, the studio's founder, posted an eight-minute gameplay walkthrough showing a mission to kill a vampire named Zsombor by infiltrating his house. The perspective is top-down and abstracted. You see building layouts rendered like architectural plans, with dots representing people. Clicking into a room opens an interaction window with options: flip a light switch, take out a guard, hypnotise a servant, or search for items. Every action costs time, tracked by a clock in the corner of the screen, and spending too much of it puts you in danger. Completing missions earns XP that feeds into a branching skill tree, letting you specialise as either a stealthy manipulator or a rampaging creature of the night. Levels are designed for replay, with new tasks unlocking after your first successful run.

I love this concept. The immersive sim genre usually means first-person environments packed with physics objects and AI routines, so seeing someone reduce the whole thing to its decision-making skeleton is an interesting move. Bithell has always been good at finding the core of a genre and rebuilding around it; Thomas Was Alone turned platforming into a story about rectangles, and John Wick Hex turned action movies into a timeline puzzle. Vampirium: 1997 looks like it's doing the same thing to Deus Ex and Dishonored, keeping the player agency while throwing out the rendering budget.

Built on a Mac, built on Godot

The game is being developed in the Godot Engine, the open-source tool that's been picking up steam with indie developers. Bithell wrote on Bluesky that it was "developed on my Mac, and Steam Deck compatible already with hardware specific settings/controls (60fps, natch)." That line, combined with the minimalist art style, suggests this is a very lean production, possibly a solo project from Bithell himself.

There's context that makes this announcement bittersweet. Bithell Games laid off the majority of its staff last August after failing to secure funding for a larger project following Tron: Catalyst's release in June 2025. The studio went from shipping a well-reviewed licensed game to near-collapse in a matter of months. Vampirium: 1997 looks like a direct response to that reality: a game scoped to what one person (or a very small team) can actually build and ship without waiting for a publisher to write a cheque.

Bithell is also releasing a novella called The Last Portrait chapter by chapter alongside development, fleshing out the alternate-history world. The game is planned for a roughly two-year Early Access run, with new locations adding characters, settings, and powers before a full release that will include several additional levels, new objects, and an increased level cap.

Vampirium: 1997 is heading to Steam Early Access at an unannounced date, with PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch also listed as platforms. After what Bithell Games went through last year, seeing the studio come back with something this creatively sharp rather than playing it safe is exactly the kind of resilience I want to see rewarded.