Numbers Go Up: A Gothic Horror Tale.

Much more of a Cookie Clicker-style idle game than the screenshots imply, Vampire Survivors boils down the current state of the roguelite genre to it's bare, naked essentials, to such a degree that I'm surprised it even bothered to roll with the 'Castlevania asset pack' look It's got going right now. If your idea of fun is to slowly but surely watch bars fill up and tick boxes to make that process more automated, hours passing by without the stimulus of an ongoing narrative or varying presentation, boy, do I got the game for you! It didn't really do much for me, unfortunately, but I can see why it's gotten so popular as a 'chillout podcast unwind' sort of thing, it's extremely evocative of the flash based things we'd play during a class in the computer lab years ago...

A truly dangerous type of game, especially if you haven't got much time to spare for entertainment!

among my backloggd friends, this game has the most pronounced spread of like, 0.5 stars to 4.0 stars. i like this game, but the more i play it the more i kind of cool on it. it's fun in short bursts, but i can't really sink hours into it anymore. all my runs end up looking pretty similar, regardless of starting character. i can tell 5 minutes in whether or not i'm making it through the full 30. i know which powerups work better than others, etc. etc. like, learning the game made it less fun. it's still a nice little timewaster - something to do with my hands while i zone out with a podcast on, something to play in bed on my steam deck until i fall asleep and wake up to a game over screen. but i can't really play it "actively" as much anymore

you know what it is? when you've figured out "ah, this is an unstoppable build. i've already won," you then still have to play the other 20 minutes of a run. and that can feel really good in games like binding of isaac or whatever! it even feels good in this game the first 50 times it happens. but after that, it just gets so predictable and tedious

maybe this is another plateau before i find some other level of enjoyment and progression, but for now it's just a "i can't think of anything else to play" diversion

edit: man, i've flip-flopped on this game so many times. every time i start getting bored, it adds some wild secret level and a bunch of items and a whole other progression thing to do. and then i'm enthralled yet again, this being my "steam deck in bed right before passing out" game of choice. and then it plateaus, gets boring, and then boom- another layer gets added. this game is either 2 stars or 4 stars depending on when in the cycle you ask me

Finally completed this games content (at least pre-DLC). Everyone who plays this follows the same path:
- Play a few runs, probably die in most, don't quite understand the appeal.
- Play again, finally finish your first run
- Unlock new stuff, and from there the brain worm sets in

I'll be back to play the DLC at a later date, fantastic game.

so ive been thinking about time a lot recently, about how many games i have in the backlog and wishlist and how im gonna beat them all before i die. that was part of the reason i made a huge high priority list to see what i actually fucking care about lol, because to be honest about 250 of the games on the backlog i dont really give a shit about, they just fall between mid and low priority titles. and when accounting for replays, thats around 200 total games i wanna play before i die. lol fucking looking at my wishlist, whats on there that i really really wanna buy? the rest of trails? wolverine? baldur's gate? p3r which is already pre-ordered? that's not much...

the point im trying to make is the majority of games ive added over the nearly 3 years ive been on this website are little more than a "that looks cool, i dont wanna forget it". but i forget anyway. i dont forget trails or xenoblade or persona 2 but i forget why i wanna play fucking... elder scrolls or stephens sausage roll(????) so maybe they arent that wonderful of an experience im imagining if i have little care to whether i buy them for more than ticking down the boxes of "182 games" on my wishlist. i could spend 108 dollars on the steam store for shit i wouldnt play for years. maybe id boot it up but then be like "nahhh" like i was for fear and hunger, or blood, or duke nukem?

today was christmas (duh) and i got a lot of stuff id consider high priority, metroid, p5t, ff16. i got a few other things on steam, one of them being this game. and while it's a perfectly fun game, with nice music and a nice loop, there was an emptiness i felt whilst playing. i could be p-ranking violence or something. its like that game "arrow a row"

you feel so empty after it ends but then get back in thinking itll be better the next round, but you die and die and die and keep playing and keep playing and keep playing. and unlike something like cybergrind, or fortnite thats based on skill or playing with friends its mostly based on rng and such, and just keeps you coming back but like social media you dont really wanna be scrolling, i could be playing something epicsauce instead, yknow. something from those 200 games. and thats not to say this is unfun or anything, it just feels.. empty.

i feel like id be a bad candidate for trying out hoyoverse games for the same addictive tendencies, but even then those have fantastic art and a story behind them, which this does not

im refunding it

in many ways, this is the platonic ideal of a videogame. you're a little guy and you have to not get hit by draculas. if anyone who's never played a game before asked me to show them one, i'd show them this.

the castlevania nostalgia trip is lost on me but the lofi retro late dos/early win95 aesthetic is rock solid. i like it.

hope they don't fuck it down the line by trying to add "lore" or "plot".

Yeah, I'm done.

When you get a treasure chest it shows you a spinning upgrade wheel while your prize money increases, just like one of those gross casino ads that shows up on reddit mobile over and over.

Play FLERP or one of the many other "bullet heaven" games instead. At least they don't explicitly look like an advertisement for a fucking casino.

This is like fine.

Big number go up idle game type beat and there are games I find that do it better but its still got likeable charm, loads of content and is a fun couple of hours. Idk how much longer I'm gonna play it but it's alright.

I don't really see the GOTY praise at all this has been getting from some but it's a fun time killer.

This is it? This is the game that I saw break the website in two for a short bit???

Ok being real I don’t like this game, breaking a game down to its most basic mechanics and just having it be a “watch the numbers go up” stuff is fine for like a time waster games but I saw so much praise and pure vile hatred flung at this game and even after playing it I’m just confused on why people would even get as mad at this game as they did. So I got super bored and decided to just play it for myself to get a better understanding of what people were even talking about.
Is this one of the best games of last year…..eh….that’s really a person by person thing, personally I’d say hell no since this is as basic as a video game can by; it’s pure ADHD filled gunk all the way down with every little for me to chew on besides lore pages which read are fffffine, very gay and I mean that in a good way; but I’m dyslexic as fuck so when it comes to lore I’d much rather you have it implemented into the pre-existing world and have people figure it out along the way like Dark Crystal or Zeno Clash, or just have it slowly unfold itself on to the player as they explore it more and meet more of it’s world like Mass Effect or Lord of the Rings, in compersion to just have some poor underpaid intern just write page after page of lore for a world and characters that look like NFTs. The sprites are fine but too static for my taste, most of the background are also static and super plane; I guess it’s to make it easier when all the enemies just bum rush you but I just think it looks to dull, and the whole upgrading system during the game is actually just pure dopamine rushes and I still don’t know if I like it or not; on the one hand it make my ADD happy and it’s fun to look at the pretty colors, on the other hand half the time I feel like I’m looking at a slot machine and I feel gross and nasty just thinking about the weird manipulative dopamine tactics I can feel oozing out of the look boxes you find.
Overall I can understand why people would play this over and over again and enjoy every second of it. I just couldn’t get into it mostly because I like my games to have substance like a hooking narrative or fun evolving gameplay. I’ll still never understand people who have this weird hatred for this game though.

LIke I get where people are coming from when they say this game is really bad and it’s a pure nothing of a video game once you break it down but like……it’s not like it’s trying to be much else. It’s a time waster game that cost 5 bucks; what else were you expecting? Like is this really the hill you wanna die on? Do you wanna die on the hill calling forth a game that is about on the same level as shit like cookie clicker? While I don’t personally like games like this I’m not gonna get mad over it and more importantly feel as though people or REALLY like the game are wrong in some way, to me these are just junk food games that you play when you don’t wanna think and you just wanna fiddle with you hand while on a call in discord or something I can think of FAR worse game you could do that with (I’ve been doing it with Mafia 3 and I’ve hated every second of it, idk why I keep playing it but I have). I didn’t want to turn this last bit into a gamer rant so I’ll just leave it at let people play what they wanna play, and hate on the game just because the writer of the game is Jim Stephanie Sterling, that’s just poorly masking your transphobia and they get enough shit from gamers already so like please just leave them alone and stop stalking them on twitter thinking you owned them by calling them a man; you didn’t do jack shit that just makes you very cringe and gay.

Not really sure of too many other games of this style to feel as if each unlock you get after a point outright worsens the experience but I genuinely feel like after a certain point, the fun of this game just entirely dries out due to having too many ways to essentially be able to "solve" what RNG is present here. The first few hours here are honestly pretty neat, having a lot of different elements of discovery all wrapped up with a game that's fun in a "numbers go up" sort of way, with a selection of upgrades that you need to vaguely strategise about which ones you take to balance between offence and defence while practically constantly unlocking new stuff to mess about with as well.

While basically none of these individual elements really call for you to majorly change how you approach the game, there's still some appeal in both mowing down thousands of enemies while also constantly upgrading in some attempt to last that bit longer, sometimes having to compromise your ideal loadout for what would be convenient at the time. Unfortunately, it really doesn't take long to unlock the vast majority of the weapons and upgrades in the game and once you do you end up realising that there are very few of them to the point where getting your "perfect run" once you've picked up a few permanent upgrades is basically a given, which is made even worse with the way that basically all of the weapons you get in this, especially later on, are things that require minimal player input to actually utilise, turning a lot of lategame scenarios into standing around for 15 minutes watching colours and numbers flashing across the screen while doing literally nothing other than very occasionally walking a few steps so a boss enemy doesn't kill you.

The first couple of times this happens it's pretty cool, since there's a lot of appeal in completely breaking these games wide open, but the magic is lost in this case when basically EVERY run ends up becoming like it as long as you evolve a couple of weapons, which is basically bound to happen. It's made even easier with the amount of different ways you can control the RNG the game has, and while boosting your odds through these sorts of methods can be pretty interesting usually, the amount of these avenues provided to you ends up entirely trivialising one of the main dynamics of the game that was engaging in itself, as now it's very simple to just entirely what you control on any given run without any real thought or skill involved in the process. If provided a loadout you needed to follow to the T, it's something that any average player could do basically every time without fail once you've gotten a few rerolls, banishes and skips, and once this point has been hit, all sense of variety becomes deeply artificial since it ends up wholly relying on the player to engage with it in any sort of way, which doesn't really work when so many weapons don't require the player themselves to do anything particularly different with how they approach it.

In a game that so strongly encourages optimisation of your build to be able to dish out increasingly ridiculous, screen clearing attacks, making said optimisation so simple and effective always feels like a bit of an odd decision, especially since that seems to just further discourage actually using different things once you've found something that seems to just obliterate everything. For a game that tries so hard to make for an experience that just bombards the player nonstop with increasingly flashy effects and the like, actually hitting the stage where this occurs feels exponentially less rewarding with each new tool in your arsenal when it ends up feeling like a totally solved game that's so easy to work out how to solve it, until it really just becomes an exercise in standing 100% still for extended periods of time to unlock the final batch of upgrades that feel entirely meaningless at that point since you've already got everything that lets you win without a reason to ever use anything else. Despite all of this I don't think the game is entirely worthless or anything like that either, as the first part of the game where you're building up to the first couple of fully broken runs is a fun time that kept me fully engaged, it's just that anything past that point starts getting really repetitive and hollow to me, despite the fact that there's still a bunch of content the game wants you to get through at the point this happens.

A 2000s-era flash game that's addicting and better than it has any right to be, but ultimately feels like video game junk food.

Not sure if y'all remember that Bloons TD game from like 2007 but Vampire Survivors kind of reminded me of that addicting old flash game. It looks a bit like an old browser game that co-opts a legally questionable amount of Castlevania's enemies, weapons, characters, and art. The gameplay initially feels too simple as all you control is the direction your character moves. Yet despite all that, it somehow all comes together in a package that works quite well and is highly addicting.

The simple controls make it incredibly accessible and it refocuses gameplay on developing a good build rather than how fast your reflexes are or how well you can master combat. It simplifies all of that and streamlines the road to making you feel like a god as you steamroll hordes of enemies.

Getting a good build going that lets you quickly turn into a walking wrecking ball is incredibly satisfying, but like in many rogue-lites, a lot of that depends on RNG. Toward the beginning of the game, there's not a lot you can do to combat the randomness, but that ends up not holding you back too much. As you get deeper into the game, there are plenty of ways to control your build during a run.

The game is pretty good about constantly rewarding you for the runs as you earn gold to buy permanent upgrades and unlock weapons, characters and stages as you hit milestones. There are 157 total things to unlock in this game so there’s no shortage of carrots on sticks to keep you chasing after the next thing. Between the constant goal chasing and how satisfying it is to mow down thousands of enemies, Vampire Survivors is like a constant shot of dopamine. But with that constant shot of pure unfiltered dopamine, that high didn't last long. It's like eating a bunch of junk food - yeah it'll give you some energy for like 15 minutes but then you'll crash hard afterward.

If you're looking for mindless fun that scratches the itches of one part "I like to see numbers go up and get big" and one part power trip, Vampire Survivors is great and highly addicting. But don't expect a lot of depth beyond that.

+ Satisfying to put a build together that makes you feel like a god
+ Extremely addicting
+ Good gameplay loop that constantly rewards you for your runs

- Video game junk food that lacks long-term satisfaction
- Questionable amount of repurposed art from Castlevania

worth playing, but only to gain true appreciation for how good games can be when they're not shameless garbage. there's something very life-affirming in sitting down and experiencing something that values your time and attention this little and realizing, wow, this really isn't actually what most games are like; most developers at least have a modicum of respect for their audience and a genuine desire to engage players and provide them with something of actual substance, regardless of how successfully they ultimately manage to pull that off. it takes something this nakedly exploitative, devoid of effort and borderline dystopian to really jolt your brain into realizing how good you normally have it. thank you, video games, for usually not being this shit.

When can I log a Survivors-like as "Completed"? Because I definitely haven't done everything, but I think I've done enough now? I have like 40 hours in the game and I feel like I've seen basically all it has to offer. I decided to finish off the Garlic Paradise Adventure before logging it here.

The game is very best at the start. I was completely hooked and it was so fun to play and level up and get stronger! In the beginning when you're low level, Vampire Survivors actually takes a bit of attention and skill to play. But once you figure out how the game works, it becomes incredibly trivial.
Nowadays, by minute 20 out of 30, I've maxed out my weapons and can stand idly while a bunch of flashing lights kill everything for me. It was best in the first few hours where I couldn't even get to the end of the first level! After that it was a slow descent into monotony.

And now I'm at a point where there's not really much content left except "Get Each Character to Level X and You Unlock Y". Which is pretty lame and the type of content that I would usually just ignore. But honestly I probably will play this game a bit more, it's the game I play in the background while I watch One Piece. (Just got to episode 800). But I'm not sure how much more gameplay I can squeeze out of this game.

Edit: I originally gave this a 3/5, but after reflecting on it some more, this game is a lame-ass video game equivalent to tiktok sludge content. The same thing as scrolling endlessly on your phone for no reason. Just nothing of any value.