What Did We Play Yesterday?

Vampire Survivors is an action roguelike by poncle in which your goal is to survive an endless onslaught of enemies for 30 minutes. The game has gone viral in recent months, garnering over 87,000 reviews on Steam. The price point has probably helped a lot, but I like the slapdash Castlevania romhack aesthetic and items like floor chicken and feel this is a really underpriced gem.

It only has directional controls. Weapons fire automatically, and in a lot of respects it feels like an auto-clicker. I wasn't surprised to hear poncle has a background in gambling machine design, the way the game is designed, both in terms of waves and the lootboxes.

If you like that sorta thing, you can get sucked into it and there is an interesting depth of strategy for timing and weapon combinations. Throw in various unlockable modes, like hyper mode which dumps even more enemies, and a speed mode which doubles the clock speed so you can complete a full run in 15 minutes, unlockable characters, multiple stages, and weird secrets and there's a lot to play with in this $2.99 package.

If you like this type of game AT ALL it is certainly worth a try. I got into this because my partner, who only plays maybe 1 or 2 games a year, got addicted to it. He maxed the cheeves available at the time and has since moved on, but I'm still plunking away at my own cheev list, I try to do at least one run a night.