Vampire Survivors
| Developer: Luca Galante | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Poncle | Sound: |
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| Year: 2022 | Difficulty: |
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Genre: Thinking game  | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
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If just reading through all these lines tires you out already, trust my rating blindly. The bleating hordes with their overwhelmingly positive reviews can’t all be wrong.
You know what twin-stick shooters are? This genre has been around for ages (Robotron 2084, 1982). Imagine that one day, a mobile game developer had the brilliant idea to lop off one of the controls. Thus was born the single-stick shooter, where the player moves the character while the game handles the other half of the work: shooting, and sometimes, even aiming.
One of these games, Magic Survival (2021, iOS), ideally suited for the “mobile” platform, served as the blueprint for the game we’re discussing today: Vampire Survivors, a horror-themed knockoff with graphics that don’t even try to hide their references to the Castlevania series.
The concept is dead simple: survive as long as possible, kill the hordes of enemies swarming towards you (in straight lines but by the thousands), collect the gems they drop to gain experience points, level up, unlock new powers, and thus, survive longer, kill more enemies, collect more gems… You see why the snobs call this a “gameplay loop”.
I remember my first game. I was trying to dodge enemies (one-handed, of course), picking up tons of gems… I felt about as excited as I do while vacuuming.
Naturally, I died quickly, and after the game over screen, I got showered with achievements (reward badges).
“Congrats, champ, you killed 15 bats!”
“You reached level 2!”
“You reached level 3!”
“You opened a chest all by yourself!”
I felt like I was being taken for a fool…
And there it is; the game’s main driving force: constantly rewarding the player for every trivial task, even when they fail (even when they quit!) to make sure they don’t notice the emptiness of the concept. Add to the badges some flashy light and sound effects, straight out of casino slot machines, designed to cultivate a kind of neurotic compulsion tied to hoarding wealth (a theme I’ve touched on in Boulder Dash) as well as the rush of feeling overpowered when, by the end of the game, the sheer volume of projectiles and explosions completely obscures the screen, instantly vaporizing the swarms of enemies, no matter how endless they seem.
Oh, and the epilepsy warning at the start? Not there just for laughs!
Second motive (and last, because I did say it didn’t piss far): the Rogue-lite component, with a “t”. It’s about adjusting the difficulty to the user’s level, always granting a little something at the end of a game. A bonus, a power-up, or a new avatar which, unlike the aforementioned badges, confers a concrete advantage that marginally improves their chances of making it further next time.
The subject, flattered, no matter how terrible they are, has the impression that no session is “useless” (irony). They feel the satisfaction of progressing, and will end up triumphing over the game no matter what. From then on, the game only recognizes their assiduity, not their skill. If you think about it, this is the opposite of an arcade game, which requires players to have a certain mastery through training—or failing that, to keep feeding the machine more coins to continue. Here, it’s the game that pays us to stay!
I confess, what bothers me most about Vampire Survivors is the wildly enthusiastic response from the gaming community. I know I shouldn’t let that factor in, but we all have our biases. It became popular overnight after a YouTuber showcased it. I’m not blaming the developer. All concepts are good to try, after all, and good for him if he achieved success beyond his wildest dreams. My grievance is with the consumers who fuel this phenomenon with their purchases (yes, I’m guilty too!) and with the so-called expert critics recommending this title. Because of us, publishers, big and small, are going to flood us with bland clones for years, emboldened to churn out risk-free, sanitized formulas with all the usual manipulative tricks thrown in, treating us like a bunch of lab monkeys.
Apparently, the primary selling point for the fans is the price (5 euros in 2023). Dozens of hours of entertainment for the price of a sandwich!
But if value-per-hour is your main criterion, why not look out the window and count cars? Cheaper and just as fulfilling!
Others praise it as “satisfying” a word that has no “satisfactory” translation in French. Relaxing? Antistress? This might be connected to that trend of satisfying videos involving power washers…
Are people really so vapid now that they seek nothing but soothing sensory experiences without the slightest challenge, like infants hypnotized by the plastic mobiles spinning above their cribs? It’s worrying, isn’t it?
If you’ve made it this far, you probably have a pretty clear idea of my opinion, and if not, here’s a quick summary as a conclusion:
Vampire Survivors is a product devoid of any creative inclination (the graphics are pulled from a developer’s asset library), with bare-bones mechanics and nearly no variation; the heart of the game rests exclusively on a carefully constructed addiction loop, built with infantilizing and unhealthy slot-machine tactics.
Yes? What else do you want? What’s wrong about the mark?
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