Vampire Survivors is painfully simple. While that is in part because it is in early access, meaning the game is still adding new content and tweaking balance on existing content, it’s also just… a really simple concept. The game is an auto-battler, so you don’t trigger combat abilities, they just happen. Some, like Garlic, are permanent effects. Most trigger at regular intervals: Daggers fly in whatever direction you’re looking, or a magic missile seeks out the nearest enemy. And then there are the passive abilities that modify them, increasing the affected area or the number of projectiles.
This means that you, as a player, don’t appear to do much. Surely that would get boring fast?
Reader: It doesn’t. I don’t really get it, but it doesn’t.
When you start the game, you have a single character unlocked. While the whole game is rife with Castlevania references, few are as overt as the lead character, Antonio Belpaese, a whip-wielding analogue to Simon Belmont. But while you’re still killing vampires, ghosts, and ghouls with a whip, Vampire Survivors is nothing like Castlevania. Instead, you have an endlessly scrolling screen with monsters attacking from any and every direction at all times. Your goal is to make yourself into the boss of a bullet hell game, with so many attacks and effects launching in all directions that the increasingly powerful enemies can’t get ahold of you.
As enemies die, they drop crystals. Collect crystals and you level up. When you level up, the game gives you three options for a new or upgraded ability. If you upgrade your whip, for example, you will now whip in front of and behind you every couple seconds. Upgrade it again and the whip’s cooldown is released; again, and you now whip above you as well. But you can also add new attacks. Maybe in between whips, you want to throw knives forward? Perhaps you’d like a ring that causes lightning to strike at random intervals on the map?
Whatever you pick, as you go, stronger enemies are coming faster and faster. In a way, Vampire Survivors is a game about escalation. Can you escalate your damage faster than the enemies can escalate their health? This simple loop creates a shockingly tense set of encounters. At a certain point, enemies attack so fast and hard that the game essentially asks: Do you trust your build? You lose the ability to navigate effectively through the swarms, an essential skill early in the game. Instead, you have to wade forward into the morass and pray that you’ve built enough defenses to survive the wave as it crashes down upon you.
Meanwhile, as you play, you unlock new characters. Some characters are unlocked by surviving a certain amount of time. Others are unlocked for meeting specific criteria. Each starts with a different weapon, as well as a different core modifier. Imelda, for example, starts with a magic wand, and as she levels up, she gets more experience for each kill, making her levels ramp quicker. Poe, on the other hand, starts with garlic (the strongest weapon), but -30 health. While the differences are minimal as the game progresses, they do prompt genuinely different playstyles and lead off surprisingly different builds.
Vampire Survivors is a simple game — but it is powerfully addictive. Whether it is the rapid clip of new unlockables you get early in the game or the quick restarts and negligible loading times that make it easy to jump in over and over again, this is the perfect “I have twenty minutes to kill before an appointment” game. I don’t know why it works as well as it does, but give its $3 price tag, I can’t recommend this one enough to folks who are curious and looking for a quick, engaging game.