Policy

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Recently a mild friend of mine and game designer I'm a huge fan of released a video about Vampire Survivors as a sort of 'non-game'. You can view it here. So I first want to say I respect where she is coming from and how a seasoned game designer sees the same exploitative psychology in slow upgrade action RPG rougelikes as having the same skinnerbox habits. Essentially, she demands a specific rage on a particular point, when talking about the game she notices the lack of combat design, that regardless of your loadout the approach is always the same, dodge into the infinite void. "This is not combat design, this is NOTHING".

This argument is well put and rhetorically focused, and the focus on not wasting audience time is an apt starting point for most sensible game experience vehicles (although it's exactly where stuff like The Beginner's Guide comes in to take friction, but I digress). However, I do feel like 20 Minutes Till Dawn has something to include into this sort of discussion.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is an absurdly, vastly, better game for anybody who has played it. There's aim based weapon variety which require aiming at the enemy + slightly increased obstacle evasion, better aesthetic sensibilities, and a 10 minute decrease in overall time spent with the game. And all the characters you can play are slender girls with aesthetic principles rather than just Castlevania cardboard cutouts. You would be surprised how much difference these small changes make to the game experience.

At 10 minutes in, the combat variety is increased with a boss fight in a limited section of the map, it's not just mindless shoot and dodge. Your character load outs are all different with different effects they have and guns they can choose from.

This is not to say that 20 Minutes Till Dawn is a game you should play, it still has a randomness factor in the level ups and permanent upgrades, along with a lack of enemy variety but there's a measurable improvement on all other areas of play. But it's also not one that I can say with any degree of reprehensibility that you shouldnt.

Most early arcade games were not actually intended to be played ad infinitum, and so didn't have much difficulty throttling besides endurance and usually underdesigned obstacles. One that comes to mind is shown in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters where one of the primary subject Steve Weibe tries for the high score on Donkey Kong. In it his 2 main obstacles to success here are endurance and behind the scenes corruption in the high scoring scene itself. Yet there's a few moments splintered throughout Donkey Kong as an endurance test where the obstacles prove as Absurd, particularly one moment the documentary goes in depth about is 3rd Elevators. As shown by the example here, this is not good game design, this is game design that you're purely trying to outperform against, it's gaming as a higher level endurance sport with these janky obstacle getting in the way, but when we talk about it from the perspective of 'pure design' it becomes obnoxiously under considered and frustrating. Vampire Survivors is trying to bring this older style of play and experience as a rigourous test of endurance into contemporary progression systems. The idea is that you will eventually learn more optimal builds and try to finesse around the randomness to your best ability and endure its counting clock to a satisfying end. It's a neat idea of course but as an actualization of that system it's a fucking failure due in large part to its genuine lack of difficulty in general. Vampire Survivors is easy and genuinely uninteresting, its popcorn entertainment you can bloat on. But 20 Minutes Till Dawn is by all metrics an improvement and an actualization on that system, one that I think could be further improved upon but it a great step in the right direction, with fair inputs and a decent balance of difficulty and variety. The variety offered from skilled play means improvement exists.

The issue though is that 20 Minutes Till Dawn is a blatant clone of Vampire Survivors. We can't talk about it without admitting its apeing the formula with the exception of course that some people will decide to play it first.

Sometimes when we write about genres we don't like, I think we have a habit of trying to 'outsmart' the habits of the average gamer by implying that what they are doing is lackluster. The mobile gamer is a moron because Candy Crush is worse Bewjewled and they are both braindead match threes. FPS games are needlessly violent but its also point and click, nevermind that COD, TF2, and Splatoon all play and look completely differently. Incremental games are often derided as 'cookie clickers' and with the forward momentum of socio-cultural movement the nuances and interests start to roll into one another.

In the beginning of July, a close online friend of mine Nyx, who is a fashionista and film geek came over to my parents house which at 25 I'm still trapped in. I sat around with extreme anxiety about 'what were we going to do'. I didn't like going outside, and I was nervous about the fact all I had to do was really play on a computer. But those anxieties were severely eased when I realized how low maintenance my friend Nyx was, me and her would play this game a half dozen times in the morning hopping on and off the 1 player remote commenting on the general improvements as they happened. "I unlocked a new character!"..."Check out this new gun!". "Woah there's an upgrade system in here I didn't even know about". etc.

It was a blast and made me realize a certain nuance, a zen and kinship to gaming that is often ineffable to describe. And while I'm often deeply wracked with regret and anxiety I'll always look positively on this experience as I used to in a similar way when I went over to my other friends house and played Bloodbourne on her PS5 and traded idle chatter between some of the most incredible moments in a game. Or when the love of my life was around with me as I played the frustrating and slow No More Heroes system on the Wii as she cheered me on.

For me, gaming is one of the most deeply engrained social experiences I have, and a game constantly demanding a perfect difficulty curve is not always wanted. As much as you can trash something like Vampire Survivors, its Action RPG rougelite elements share a degree with Spelunky etc. It shares an 'evasion mechanic' with Binding of Isaac which despite Nyx's limited experience with games shares it as a favourite 'time waster' game.

But no matter what there will be downtime or lulls or things that are not perfect, things that are innovated eventually with time. Vampire Survivors had to walk so that 20 Minutes Till Dawn could take stride, and who knows, there will be another game in this genre yet we dont even know about. But it takes time, and game design is a paintbrush with time itself as the chronological palette. For what other art form has racing through the painting or enduring through it as long as possible as a genuinely lauded sport you can improve on. If nothing else I thank videogames for being able to give me an innovative solution to a long standing anxiety I have around how to passively loiter time with your friends, and with yourself. Videogame's are not limited to just doing this of course, but its one hell of an advantage its history benefits from. Most people I've seen successfully play Vampire Survivors with merit, have done it while streaming or with friends. I think its a bad game, but only in part because I know what the next best thing is and that's where I feel the focus is worth bringing. This is also why I don't believe in intellectual property rights, you could quite easily argue that 20 Minutes Till Dawn as a paid for 'mod' of Vampire Survivors in an abstract sense, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. There's lots of mods for Slay the Spire that use the engine itself. Lots of great games are really just borrowing a large degree of its resources from something else. I believe all people who make games or mods of games deserve financial compensation for their work without the threat of jail by those who own the original assets. As this game genre continues to mutate it'll begin to harmonize more with what Heather desires in these sorts of games, not less.

Reviewed on Aug 12, 2022


1 Comment


1 year ago

Sidenote: I want to point out much of the success of Vampire Survivors is as a result of the streamer influences giving so much time to it as a more 'casual' game. The irritation I have here is that a lot of these bozo's, some of which I am personally very entertained by (Jerma, Northernlion, etc) played this game but didn't play 20 Minutes. It shouldn't be on me to find more engaging versions of a base interest you're showing people. I think there's something distasteful about playing micro gambling but then no other action RPG roguelites. And a lot of the frusteration from people like Heather stem in part from the fact that indie games like these become successful at the expense of everything else. Vampire Survivors I consider almost a sort of corrupt dystopian underbelly of streamer entertainment circles. Minimize the difficulty of play and create a glacial engagement, there's no stakes in watching Vampire Survivors either. While 20 Minutes, Enter the Gungeon, and BoI all do. Where I start to get pissed is in realizing, in particular, that most people probably don't even know what I'm talking about when I bring up 20 Minutes outside this specific special interest website forum board.