The Hunter stands on a rooftop with Katarina. The locket is whole again, but she doesn’t take it.
Their first mission is a gothic dungeon crawl through the Theatre of Nightmares, where a rogue stage magician has become a flesh-weaving abomination. The Hunter fights with a rapier, a steam-powered pistol, and a "Glimmer-Cage" grenade that traps spectral enemies. Katarina phases through enemies to stab them from behind, all while delivering deadpan commentary.
This is the emotional core. Without Katarina’s snark to ground him, the Hunter falls into despair. He relives the original Van Helsing’s failure to save her from a werewolf curse decades ago. The gameplay here shifts—no companions, only a flickering lantern and whispers. He must literally cut through his own trauma using a new weapon: The Final Cut , a blade forged from a solidified scream, capable of severing fate itself.
“Let’s go.”
Katarina steps forward. She offers The Other a better bargain: a story . She tells the epic of the Van Helsing bloodline—all the failures, the petty arguments, the moments of unexpected kindness. The Other, a being of pure chaos, has never encountered narrative structure. It finds the idea of “character growth” fascinating.
It’s during this chase that they encounter the true antagonist: , a disgraced alchemist from Van Helsing’s own era. He has been kept alive for 200 years by a machine-spirit hybrid. Moribund reveals he created the Stain on purpose. He is not trying to destroy Borgovia—he is trying to awaken The Other so he can bargain for immortality for all.
“Do you want me to raise bees?” he asks. The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Final Cut
The Hunter realizes the truth: Moribund is already dead. He was the first victim of the Stain, and his machine-spirit is just a recording of his madness. The only way to stop him is to convince The Other that Moribund’s proposal is boring.
In a gothic-noir metropolis choked by industrial smog and eldritch horror, the monster hunter Van Helsing and his spectral wisecracking companion, Lady Katarina, must unite warring factions of magic and machine to stop a mad scientist from tearing reality apart. Act I: The Arrival of the Stain The story opens not with a scream, but with a cough. Borgovia, the last bastion of Victorian-era resistance against the rising tide of the Mechanical Age, is dying. The city is split: the superstitious, magic-fueled Old Town and the brutalist, lightning-powered Industrial Quarter. A toxic, shimmering purple fog known as The Stain is seeping from the sewers, mutating chimney sweeps into clawed lurkers and turning factory steam into sentient poison.
Our hero, The Hunter (a customizable descendant of Abraham Van Helsing), arrives by dirigible. He’s not here for glory; he’s here for a contract. The Borgovian Council promises a fortune to destroy the source of the Stain. With him is the ghost of Lady Katarina, his sardonic, immortal guardian bound to his bloodline. The Hunter stands on a rooftop with Katarina
“You saw my death,” she whispers, her ghostly form flickering. “The real one. I was a coward.”
The Final Cut: Curse of the Borgovian Stain