Code Vein is one of the most incredibly insane and laughably bad games I've ever played. It somehow jacks up everything that was bad about the Souls games to an incredibly degree that it's hard not to see as a parody of souls games and anime. Full disclosure but I also played most of the game in multiplayer which furthered added to the experience of playing an interactive version of The Room where I can see the passion seeping through every aspect of this game but misdirected passion much like Tommy Wiseau himself.

The level design is some of the worst I had the pleasure of laughing the whole way through with my mates, so many fuck you moments I have to assume the developers were sitting at their desks with the biggest shit eating grins on their faces going "HEHEHEH IM SO SMART" and I lapped up every unseeable death pit and enemy spawning from a wall. It is incredibly impressive for a game to have made a map that is useless in 2019, the map doesn't have layers and a lot of the levels vertically stack across large distances so the map becomes a liability more than anything.

This game is really seen to be believed how ludicrously bad it is, give it a shot and drink in all the awful map design, terrible combat choices, and baffling systems that were just put in because they looked cool while misunderstanding everything that a good soulsborne does right

I played a Gregorian Day's worth of Vampire Survivors looking for any substance and came up empty. This game is the ludological equivalent of doodling endlessly on a pad while you're on hold with the bank. Finding out the developer worked on digital slot machines before making this game made all the pieces fall into place: you pull the arm, the images flash, the numbers go up, you die. It's sickeningly mesmeric, it reeks, it is completely frictionless. It is the exact spiritual midpoint between Cookie Clicker and a pachinko machine. I am worse for having played it and so are you, may god have mercy on us all.

A free to play mobile game disguised as a fun little $5 indie project someone just accidentally did, but in reality is meticulously designed to be as addicting as possible despite there being literally 0 point or goal, not even in a meta sense. I saw a review or comment that sums it up the best, "I only died because I stopped moving for 20 minutes."

Cookie Clicker without the chocolate chip flavored lore.
Wallpaper Engine but it only has one wallpaper.

To call it shallow would be to praise even the thinnest puddle.

Pure, unadulterated dreck. This slot machine designer's glittered up swirling turd being lined up alongside the likes of Tunic in running for Best Indie 2022 is a fucking travesty. Video games are better than this, I promise.

UPDATE: I've been informed I missed the point of the game, it's not that you just waggle WASD pointlessly, you can also tick some boxes between runs before pressing continue to go back to mindlessly waggling WASD.

God I love how people who don't like this talk about it. From the outside you'd think it was some insanely transgressive thing. Gaming's "A Serbian Film". Some real visceral reactions.

It is merely some of the best "Brain off, number go up" fun I've had in ages. At times I thought it was gonnae crash from the amount of projectiles and effects layering the screen, slowing the framerate down to the teens, which made it even funnier and added to the daft power trip. Cost me like £2 and isnae trying to rinse me of my dosh through microtransactions. I don't see the problem.

It's great fun when YOU are the bullet hell.

I have 63.5 hours in Vampire Survivors, 9.6 in Seraph's Last Stand, 4.1 in Soulstone Survivors, and 3.5 in 20 Minutes Till Dawn. I've played these Survivors-likes a lot, and I daresay I even like them. However, they represent one of the greatest issues of contemporary gaming and media consumption more broadly. With little exception, Survivors-likes are about pleasure rather than enjoyment.

That these games are pleasurable is hard to deny, they're perfectly tuned to tickle the brain through large damage numbers getting larger, (theoretically) overwhelming odds, the pseudo-random element of choices on level up, and pitch-perfect dings and chimes when getting XP. Vampire Survivors in particular adds on the pleasure of opening something with its treasure chests with resplendent animations and music. The first few hours of any Survivors-like are the best because of the sense of mystery, not knowing what's behind the curtain making it tick. You're left wondering how long you can last, what evolutions are possible, what maps you can unlock, what new systems lie in store. In that sense it's not entirely dissimilar to a 'regular' roguelite like The Binding of Isaac (1,031.9 hours), Slay the Spire (282.7 hours), or Enter the Gungeon (217.9 hours). Like those games, Survivors-likes have an overarching progression with gradual unlocks for doing tasks. Like those games, there's a feeling of becoming better at the game over time. The problem is that in nearly all Survivors-likes, you aren't actually improving at all, nor are you facing an actual challenge. You simply think you are.

The three roguelites I mentioned above have a lot of their enjoyment stemming from 'breaking' the game, finding out how to effectively use its mechanics and synergies in the most advantageous way. But figuring out how to break the game requires, at least in part, some knowledge of how the game works and how to manipulate play to increase the odds of breaking the game. In TBoI, a player has to know to avoid damage to get a Devil Room. As such, getting some of the best items in the game demands mechanically perfect play. You can fail forward into some synergies for sure, but to actually unlock access to potential advantages, you have to earn it. Even the items that would allow one to overcome the skill requirement are themselves tied to a skill requirement for their unlocking. StS, as an engine-building game, lets you demolish its challenges with a well-maintained deck, but you have to know how the mechanics work and how to deal with enemies that can render your engine moot.

Survivors-likes, on the surface, have that same game-breaking with their item evolutions/syngeries. You might feel clever for discovering an evolution, and like a badass for wiping out hordes with little to no resistance. But you didn't get that power through knowing how a fight works (unless knowing to move slightly away from an enemy is intricate knowledge), you got it by picking two items from a very, very limited pool. A limited pool that allows you, with progression, to remove items from it or skip the choices until you get what you want. It's similar to holding R in TBoI to get a good first item room, or waiting at a traffic light, trying to predict when it will turn green, and saying 'that didn't count' when you got it wrong. You're sinking up to thirty minutes per run into something solvable and solved. Without the ability to choose when you use what attacks, and with enemy attacks amounting to 'go where they are thinnest' and 'move up a little bit to avoid a slow projectile,' there's no skill ceiling or skill floor. There's no consequence for a poor (read: mathematically incorrect) decision outside of your numbers not being ideal; picking up Ipecac when you have Broken Mirror this is not.

To be abundantly clear, there isn't anything implicitly wrong with the Survivors-like formula, and there's nothing implicitly wrong with finding pleasure in them. They are purposely designed to elicit pleasure, after all. The issue is that players are largely uncritical of what they are consuming, why they find it pleasurable, and whether or not it is actually enjoyable. Pleasure and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive, but pleasure is something that happens to you, and enjoyment is something earned by you. To keep things in the realm of gaming, those broken runs in TBoI are pleasurable because of a sense of accomplishment, and enjoyable because that accomplishment was meaningfully earned. Survivors-likes are pleasurable because of a sense of becoming stronger and doing well, but not enjoyable because there is minimal effort put in and no actual skill. Playing a multiplayer shooter with your friends is pleasurable and enjoyable because you are exercising your skills and spending time with people whose company you enjoy. You are lost in the moment so actions like imperfect play do not hamper your pleasure, and since you are still being tested no matter how you perform, it remains enjoyable. Playing a multiplayer shooter alone has varying pleasure tied directly to performance of play, and enjoyment derived from trying your best.

Again, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with deriving pleasure from these games. You should, however, stop and ask yourself from time to time if you are getting any enjoyment from what you're doing. Maybe you're not, and that's alright, but a life lived in pursuit of pleasure above all else is probably not a very fulfilling one. And companies know that we love pleasure. It's why social media exists in the way it does to keep your attention indefinitely. It's why Marvel movies follow the same formula time and again. It's why reality TV was and is such a massive market. It's why viral marketing and the media tell you you have to watch the new Netflix original film, lest you suffer FOMO. It's why Survivors-likes demand a large investment of time so you feel more emotionally attached to the experience and will tell your friends they have to play it.

Take a step back and ask yourself, why?

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments