YMMV / Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

• Awesome Music
  • The main theme is a re-arrangement of the first game's menu music by returning composer Rik Schaffer, oozing even more atmosphere than before.
  • Midnight, used in the new Announcement Trailer after The Chinese Room picked the game up, is appropriately dark and moody with dark techno beats and an ethereal vocal performance.
• Memetic Mutation: The Toreador trailer prompted cries of "Lost Humanity!" and jokes about how the events are clearly a Masquerade violation.
• Narm: The Malkavian at the climax of the Alternate Reality Game video had hair at least two feet tall. Intended to look like a mohawk, it looked more like an incredibly tall pillar-like beehive hairdo.
• Nightmare Fuel: In the Xbox Series X preview, Mr. Damp's apartment filled with literal People Puppets, which he dances merrily among to a cover of "Danke Schoen".
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • A pre-alpha build of the game had a playable demo at 2019's E3, which was praised for its atmosphere and character writing. Unfortunately, what most people took away from it was the less-than-stellar gameplay, courtesy of a very poor playthrough blamed on IGN but actually due to the developer who played being exhausted that brought to the fore some clunky, unpolished combat and janky animations; one particularly unflattering gif of the player unloading a clip of ammo into a mook's head and not a single bullet connecting quickly went viral. For better or worse, the game's development was later restarted by The Chinese Room in the end anyway.
  • Happened again by the extended gameplay reveal in early 2024; showing a section where the player has to play through the same section with increasingly "creepy" variations multiple times; those variations including moving mannequins and floating books, none of which are explained and don't make sense within the TTRPGs lore and the context it is shown in the game. Combined with very limited dialogue options as well as the constant banter between the protagonist Phyre and the voice-in-her-head Fabien (a far departure from the atmospheric silences often used during the first game), this lead to the gameplay reveal being heavily derided by many fans of the original game.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Brian Mitsoda and Cara Ellison were surprised so many players chose to spare Slugg in the game demo, considering Slugg is apparently written to be a loser who tries to double cross and murder the player character for an incredibly petty motive.

---