How to raise Coen's infamy and anger Brencis's vassals
Image: Rebel Wolves/Bandai Namco Entertainment
The court system in The Blood of Dawnwalker is key to your progression. Regular questing may lead to new allies and better gear, but you can also sabotage Brencis' court, mess with his boyars, and raise Coen's notoriety among the rebels. Infamy opens new pathways to defeating Brencis, but as always, it comes at a price.
Finding Witchcraft manuals really helps make Blood of Dawnwalker's human combat a lot of fun. These hexes can summon a murder of crows, set enemy blood ablaze, or even protect and reflect against a single instance of damage. The catch, however, is that you'll have to track down skill manuals to unlock them. I'll run through where to find them all below and provide a list of all the Witchcraft vendors you can buy manuals from.
At the end of Blood of Dawnwalker's prologue, you'll fight Brencis, the Knyaz of Vale Sangora, and quite obviously the game's main antagonist. It's one of those classic "you're not supposed to win this" boss fights, since losing to him plays a cutscene and continues the story.
Finding a way to escape the neverending nightmare of Home Sweet Home in Blood of Dawnwalker took me longer than I'd care to admit. Like me, you probably thought defeating Aurelius in The Silts Tower would be a quick in-out jobbie, but now you're trapped in a grindy dream sequence defeating endless tides of spectres.
Finding a way to free Mert in Blood of Dawnwalker's Under Watchful Eyes quest took me a while to work out. At first, I slaughtered the entire fort, but after such a slog of a fight I realised there must be a better way to do it—turns out there is. You can take a sneakier route at nighttime which drastically reduces the number of soldiers you have to kill.
If you're curious whether you can save Vlad in Blood of Dawnwalker, chances are you've probably just killed him. Unable to resist your newly-gained vampiric urges, you chomped his neck and drank his blood, and the game didn't give you a choice in the matter.
Choosing whether to let Anca use The Font or claim it for yourself in Blood of Dawnwalker is tough. On the one hand, you committed a lot of time to fighting your way through an ancient ruin and it'd be nice to have something to show for it. On the other hand, you've got Anca's fate to consider. This guide will contain spoilers for Anca's questline, plus the effect of this choice. All that said, here's the impact of each option.
The hottest FPS in town, Wardogs, is holding one last beta before it hits early access from September 3 to 6. Buzz for the 100-player milsim has far eclipsed the expectations of developer Bulkhead, who says Wardogs has surpassed a million wishlists on Steam.
One happy upside to Double Fine's newly-regained independence is the return of Amnesia Fortnight, the semi-regular in-house game jam in which everyone stops what they're doing and spends two weeks pitching and developing prototypes for new games. The 2026 edition of the event—seemingly the first since Microsoft acquired Double Fine in 2019—launched a Kickstarter campaign on August 31, and its $400,000 goal has already been surpassed.
(Image credit: Getty Images - Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)
Back in 2024, Dwarf Fortress surpassed 800,000 copies sold, more than enough to make co-creators Tarn and Zach Adams millionaires. At the time, they seemed to be taking a low-key approach to the whole mo' money thing, so when our intrepid interviewer Joshua Wolens caught up with Tarn at the recently-concluded Gamescom, he asked if, in the two years since then, he'd more fully adjusted to his moneybags lifestyle.
Image: Rebel Wolves/Bandai Namco Entertainment
