Yesterday I was perusing the news when in the Technology section I noticed an article declaring the gloriousness of some game that was cheap, simple yet allegedly very fun and addictive.
Vampire Survivors is an action rogue-like created by a guy who used to work in the casino industry. Out of work, he decided to utilise his skills at creating addictive gambling software and create an addictive PC game instead. This game has zoomed up the Steam charts and has had a peak of 77,000 concurrent players. It is reviewed as Overwhelmingly Positive with over 44,000 reviews. And it's still in early access.
It's not often you see an early access game held in such high esteem.
Curious about this game, and with it being a mere $4, I decided to take a look at it. From first glance it appears to be pretty barebones, and it's also pretty ugly looking too for this day and age -- it reminds me of old Apogee MS-DOS games. However, I'm not one to turn my nose up at graphics and I soon fell into the game.
I fell into the game so hard that I completely forgot about how horrible and feverish I was feeling after getting the third stupid jab (yeah, won't be getting any more. 🖕) and three hours had zoomed past before I knew it.
I've always been quite partial to rogue-likes and lites and this is a rogue-like that has its formula down pat.
You don't even have to do anything. Use your arrow keys to move around and to find a safe path around incoming enemies, and your character will auto-use their weapons. Most enemies will drop blue/green/red diamond-looking things that serve as your XP and you need to run over them to collect them. Later on you can learn a magnet skill in order for these things to come to you instead!
As you level up you get to select a random choice of abilities, and when you kill the larger creatures they drop a treasure chest for you to collect. A treasure chest which clearly shows the developer's casino roots as it ding-ding-ding's and showers you with gold.
Precious gold that you'll use to upgrade your basics and to buy new characters.
After my first playthrough, I had enough gold to get one power-up...
And also bought two lovely ladies.
I didn't really like the first guy. He and his whip felt slow and clumsy, so I was looking forward to trying out a new character. After trying out these first three, I decided that I liked Imelda the best.
Imelda has a magic wand which I was able to upgrade a few times so that it shot out multiple projectiles -and- it was with Imelda that I discovered the joy of garlic.
The garlic ability puts this stinky garlic aura around you which acts as an AoE wherever you walk! It's fantastic, I love it.
So naturally, every time I levelled up I hoped that garlic would appear in my level up options so I could keep upgrading my super stinky garlic breath!
I soon discovered though that Garlic alongside the King Bible was a force to be reckoned with! AoE power! I could literally walk through enemies!
After leading Imelda through masses upon masses of enemies as my favourite character, I unlocked this....
A lady named Clerici was available to buy! Her max health and health regeneration called to me and I quickly dove back into the game to earn enough gold to buy her.
And voila!
Her starting ability is Holy Water which is a splash of water that flies down from the heavens and may or may not actually even hit the enemies. It seemed pretty meh, until I realised I could lure the enemies into the puddles left on the ground and kill them that way.
I managed to level her up and outfit her with my favourite abilities so far - the magic wand, garlic, and the holy bible, and I was ploughing through enemies!
And I survived nearly 30 minutes! Which is my longest run so far!
This game is so so so so simple, it's ugly as hell, but it really works. I was in agony yesterday, and this teeny little game managed to take my mind away from the pain for a good three hours.
It's only $4 and if you enjoy rogue-likes/lites and bullet hells, I recommend every cent of it.
⭐️You can find it on the Steam Store here!!⭐️
Until next time!! 😄