Vampire Survivors

Vampire Survivors is a great $3 game. It's designed to be about as filling and nutritional in game terms as a bag of popcorn, and part of it's appeal is that it goes further than the face value it holds. It's ripe with unlockables and evocative moments of reveal. What holds me in content is the fact that this game is a vampire in itself; it feeds on your time remorselessly no matter how responsibly you try to play it, and until you 'figure out' how best to run the game, you are wasting whole dozens of minutes on futile attempts that sputter out mid-wave-progression because you didn't build good enough to survive the new wave strategies you could only learn about through trial and error.

I like to refer to games like this as "loser vibe checks" because the real appeal of this game is the fact that it literally asks for 30 whole irrevocable minutes of your actual life PER RUN to potentially unlock a new stage or find some new combination of funny trinkets to give you a bigger rush of power fantasy on your next go.

30 Entire of God's Own Minutes is a long fucking time if you aren't a Loser. If you go to your lunch break at the job you have to be a functioning member of society, and kick up Vampire Survivors somehow after heating up your food, you are going to be sitting with an ice-cold meal with only a few minutes to scarf it down to punch in on time, for ONE SUCCESSFUL RUN of this game. ONE. This game trades your life, your actual time spent on this earth, for facsimiles of minor upgrades that may combine to give you a new way to efficiently lightly strafe enemies to beat new stages.

I spent the most time playing this game visiting family in a miserable cabin in the woods where thankfully I packed a laptop and while I made decent headway naturally discovering all the neat whistles and features the game has, the entire day blinked away and all I felt was that I needed to keep going to unlock, I dunno, lightning bolt + duplicator at max level or some other bull shit.

Play this game to pieces if you're a loser, you'll love it.

But I personally suspect that losers have already done so, and feel robbed by how they poured so much time into unlocking near-pointless little cosmetic trinkets and alternate starts, and now they'll be mad that they didn't get more loser slop.

The game hooks you with a simple dopamine rush you're getting from annoyingly long chest openings, and with killing thousands of enemies on the screen. After you "survive" a couple of times (that is, you were able to hold on for 30 minutes), you realize that the game has nothing more to offer. It has a lot of achievements, which exist only to give you any kind of incentive to continue to play, which is meaningless; it has tens of characters, all of which are just the same character basically sans different weapon starts and some small differences in stats; quite a number of levels, all of which are huge and empty maps that doesn't make any sense to explore since the best tactic is just kill enemies in some area and collect experience rubies over and over. Speaking of tactic - there is none, you're basically either unstoppable or you get overwhelmed at some point, there is no in-between. Good fun for few hours, then you should probably move on to some other, more fleshed out dopamine rush games such as Synthetik or Hades.