There are many reasons for which someone might come to enjoy a game, be it the story and characters, or the challenge, or the strategy and decision making, or the means of self expression... the list goes on. However, there's a type of game, of no particular genre, that has become common in recent years and that just has the player perform braindead tasks over and over, "rewarding" them player only with flashing lights and increasing numbers to trigger a dopamine rush, but otherwise never developing. Such games are anathema to me, and for quite a while, I've avoided Vampire Survivors because I thought it was one of those. Having finally tried it, I'm so glad to have been wrong.

Vampire Survivors is a roguelite that presents an elegant summary of the genre's gameplay loop: you pick a character with certain traits and a map where enemies spawn endlessly, and your objective is to survive past the 30 minute mark. Your character attacks automatically with whatever weapons they have equipped, and your only input is moving them around. Enemies that die drop experience and sometimes items, and using those, you'll try to create a character build that can clear the stage. Whether you manage to do it or not, gold you collect can be used to unlock new characters and, optionally, to buy stat increases. All of this happens in the span of 30 minutes, the maximum duration of any playthrough.

The game is sold at an extremely modest price point, and yet its systems present a surprising amount of depth, starting with how there's plenty of decision-making involved in building your character: different weapons scale with different power ups, and also match the innate traits of different characters. Your inventory is limited and there's no getting rid of items, so the loadout must be picked carefully, also taking into account that every map has distinct sets of enemies that may require changing up your strategy. Finally, as much as only being able to move sounds like the recipe for shallow gameplay, there's plenty of split-second decision making both in navigating the enemies as well as deciding whether or not to go for an item or exp pellets. And if anything goes wrong and you die, at worst, you lost a few minutes.

In all likelihood, though, booting the game will mean at least a few hours flying by in an instant: not only is the gameplay loop extremely exciting, not only is pretty much every weapon in the game viable if you know how to work around it, there is also a lot of interesting stuff to unlock in each stage. The game takes its time revealing its hand: when you think you've seen everything, it throws some new secret stage or weapon at you, and pulls you back in. All in all, it's no wonder it spawned a genre of its own -- Vampire Survivors is fantastic bang-for-your-buck and deserves the love it got.

Reviewed on Mar 26, 2023


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