One Dev, One Mac, and Dracula on England's Throne

"Developed on my Mac, and Steam Deck compatible already with hardware specific settings /controls (60fps, natch)," Mike Bithell wrote on Bluesky when someone asked about platform support for his studio's newly announced game. It's a casual, almost throwaway line, but it paints a vivid picture of where Bithell Games is right now: one person, one laptop, shipping an immersive sim about working as a vampire assassin for Dracula, who also happens to be the King of England.

Vampirium: 1997 is the new project from the studio behind Thomas Was Alone, John Wick Hex, and last year's Tron: Catalyst. Set in an alternate-history late '90s England where Dracula sits on the throne, you play as a descendant of his empire tasked with eliminating threats to his rule. The Steam page describes it as "an immersive sim refocused on the fundamentals," and from the eight-minute gameplay walkthrough narrated by Bithell himself, that description fits. You're looking at abstracted top-down blueprint layouts of buildings, clicking tiles, picking dialogue options, and managing a clock in the corner of the screen. Every action costs time. Spend too much of it and you put yourself in danger.

The walkthrough shows a mission to kill a vampire named Zsombor by infiltrating his house, dealing with guards and a nosy butler, and choosing between stealth, hypnosis, environmental manipulation, or just cutting through everyone with a silver katana. Completing levels unlocks new tasks for replays, and XP feeds into a branching skill tree that lets you lean into either manipulation or outright violence. There's no flashy 3D rendering here. Character interactions pop up as dialogue windows with character art. The whole thing looks like someone distilled Hitman down to its decision-making skeleton and wrapped it in vampire fiction.

I love this kind of pitch. It's so specific and so weird that it could only come from a small team unshackled from focus groups. An immersive sim where you're clicking blueprint tiles to hypnotise a butler while managing a ticking clock for the vampire King of England? No publisher committee greenlit that.

After the layoffs

Bithell Games had to lay off the majority of its staff roughly a year ago after failing to secure funding for a larger-scale follow-up to Tron: Catalyst, which itself launched in June 2025 to solid reviews. It's not confirmed how many people are currently working on Vampirium: 1997, but Bithell's Bluesky comments strongly suggest it might just be him. The game is built in the Godot Engine, the free and open-source tool that's been picking up indie developers at a steady clip over the past couple of years.

The plan is to launch into Steam Early Access at a date that hasn't been announced yet, with an expected two-year run to full release. New locations will add characters, settings, and powers over that period, with the finished version promising several additional levels, new objects and powers, and a raised level cap.

A solo developer rebuilding after studio layoffs, working on a Mac, shipping into Early Access with a premise this delightfully unhinged. If the systems are as deep as that walkthrough suggests, Vampirium: 1997 could end up being one of those indie games people won't shut up about by the end of the year. No release date yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam now.