I have never done a hard drug in my life. Growing up in a privileged, predominantly white neighbourhood with no small amount of wealth and with no likely consequences, that might come as a surprise. Despite having potential access to some incredible stuff, or so I'm imagining, it never crossed my mind why anyone in their right mind would want to inject the good ♥♥♥♥ into their veins.

That was until the other day where I played Vampire Survivors.

Vampire Survivors is a game that was unleashed into early access on the 17th of December, 2021, and is still in early access at the time of this writing. It is the single best example, in recent memory, as to what makes a video game video gamey. It is the pure, raw, and un-refined stuff that lays bare why kids and adults alike get hooked on the stuff.

The game is amongst the simplest and easiest examples of what a game can be; a power fantasy, an arcade score smasher, and a constant wallop of positive reinforcement wrapped up in the skin of a 1990's Castlevania. Your character in Vampire Survivors begins weak, barely able to handle more than a dozen bats at a time. By the end of a 30 minute run, you have easily massacred tens of thousands of monsters, using nothing but a joystick.

The monsters hardly matter in their numbers or behaviour, mechanically amounting to a slow and steady deluge of dumb idiots slamming themselves face-first into the attacks spewing from every angle of your little character. There are some cute tricks that the monsters can do, but not many, and this leaves the player with very few choices to make in the heat of the moment. This is an interesting choice seeing as the player can do one thing only: move. The rest of the game is automatic. Vampire Survivors is in essence a bullet hell, but the bullets are very slow and can be eliminated.

"It's a bullet hell, but you're the bullet hell" is the way I've heard this described. Although I agree the game is a bullet hell, I do find the way Vampire Survivors handles the tropes of the genre refreshing. As I said before, the bullets are literally waves of thousands of monsters headed your way. There are few intricacies to this, and dodging is simple so long as the monsters are dying. To kill them, the players needs to collect and co-ordinate a suite of weapons gained by leveling up and picking up treasure chests. These weapons are nearly all reskinned and appropriated Castlevania weapons: the knife, the axe, holy water, you name it. They can all be leveled up fairly quickly, and they get immensely more powerful as you do so. Alongside your up-to 6 weapons, you can choose a bunch of support abilities as well; these include increased movement speed, area of effect on weapons, or the incredibly powerful Duplicator that makes more projectiles. Although you don't get to push any buttons yourself, the number of bullets and effects spewing from your character sprite goes from a trickle to a torrent of spinning scythes, lasers, and fireballs in little time at all. If you choose the right weapon and support items combinations you can get even more powerful versions of your weapons, and this is where the heart of the choices in the game lead up to: a question. How fast can I kill these guys?

The answer is yes, so long as you've chosen correctly and don't walk into enemies like a nimrod. This is the heart of the power fantasy in Vampure surivors, and part of the reason why it's so engrossing, though the game puts a hard cap on how powerful you're allowed to feel. I'll speak about this later on, so… put a pin in this for a few minutes.

After a run, or when you die, the game tallies how much gold you've collected over the run. This is not the blue experience gems that eventually litter the field like a spilled glitter bomb, but the proper cold hard cash you get from opening treasure chests, finding coins on the ground, or leveling up so much that you can't upgrade your weapons anymore and are forced to choose between largely useless chicken or money. This money is funneled into a meta-game progression which can boost your natural stats by a significant margin. It's fairly straightforward: you spend gold to be more powerful, get further into the game, and then get more powerful by spending more gold that you found by getting further into the game. Coupled with the randomized item choices in-game, Vampire Survivors has the shadows of what it takes to be a roguelite. That said, the levels aren't random and the enemies come in the same waves, one after the other.The elements of a roguelite are there, but Vampire Survivors has less in common with the Binding of Isaac or Dead Cells than with Shoot-em ups and arcade booth coin slammers.

So what does this game even do, then? It's easy, maybe too easy, and yet I find myself impelled to play rounds every couple of minutes. The only reason I can think of is dopamine, injected directly into the eyes and ears.

As you mulch through hundreds of the little bastards on screen, the monsters drop little gems. These are your experience points. Every experience gem gives a handy little "ting" to let the player know they got the stuff. At first, it's just a couple of tings here and there. By the end of the game it's a roar of sound effects, beeps and boops and all that other junk that players have come to expect means "reward" in game terms. The game primes players by giving only a slow trickle of this positive reinforcement before overloading them with a high that is normally quite difficult to achieve in most other games. To call it a sensory overload, an overdose of pixelated glory, is an understatement. To have a game give success so easily, so readily and so quickly, is what forces Vampire Survivors to be not just a fun game, but an addicting one; a low barrier of entry to a cascade of power, a fantasy that relies on very little effort being put into the thing. It's a game that's perfect for the lazy gamer, and admittedly that's not a bad thing. Sometimes it's great to be lazy and relax.

That said, the brain can only handle so much, and the game developers know that. First, after 30 minutes the game will end your run forcefully, sic'ing death itself to end you. To experience that kind of power again, to taste that proverbial dragon, you're going to have to play another run. Second, I've played 15 hours at the time of this writing, but now the irritation begins to set in. The boredom creeps up on me like the monsters in the game, slowly until the press of them overwhelms me and overpowers my sense of fun. Now when I play, it feels like doing a routine, like something that simply is done. It took me about 15 hours, but I have absolutely spent the game. I've wrung it out like a sopping rag, until it is dry and offers nothing more to me.

That's when the developers drop another patch with new items and content, which is apparently going to keep happening on a weekly basis. Then I'm in for another couple of hours, finding the new novelties and doing my very best to break the game again.

For $3, I'd say that's not a bad spend.

The closest thing to a neighbour this game has is Deathstate. It's the same idea: the character automates your offense while the player controls all the movement, coupled with a deeper and more menacing game. If you've played Vampire Survivors, maybe Deathstate can give you more of the same with a different vibe.