I like complex games, and there have been times in my life where that’s been a genuine problem. These days, I confine my obsession with systems-driven story generators like Rimworld and Crusader Kings 3 by restricting them to multiplayer sessions, which means I’m confined to playing only when my friends (who are far less complexity-cracky than me) are also playing. With so many summers of my youth wasted on playing Football Manager rather than nurturing my own half-decent football talent, I’m all too aware of the ability of such games to become perpetual timesinks.
That’s why someone like me needs a relentlessly simple game to decompress with – a game like Vampire Survivors.
This Early Access 8-bit hit is the most capable game at pulling me out of these self-generating, self-perpetuating wormholes of survival, royal infidelities, wars, and internal narratives I get stuck in, and transfixes me for short but intense 10-15-minute bursts that snap me out of that liminal headspace I exist in when coming out of long sessions with other games. My sessions with it are boundaried and clear-cut, satisfying me in such a way that I’m not twitchily squeezing in ‘one more go’ three minutes before I’m supposed to start cooking dinner for my partner.
Vampire Survivors, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a simple 8-bit-style game where you walk around a giant field fending off waves upon ever-growing waves of ghouls, bats, man-eating plants, and other nasties. The only buttons you need to know are the movement keys, because all your attacks occur on a timer, which means there’s nothing much to memorise and you can focus entirely on carving your way through the ungodly hordes.
As you level up, you can bolster your existing abilities to make them faster, stronger, bigger, and so on, or pick up new ones. Some abilities give you a crucifix that orbits around you in a circle, damaging anything in its path, others give you a momentary shield that absorbs a hit (essential, in my eyes), while others still can freeze enemies for a few seconds, while is extremely handy for breaking up these moving walls of monsters and squeezing through the gaps.
Eventually, you become this mobile sphere of destruction with a little person at its centre, automatically shredding every creature that mindlessly enters your vicinity. The power trip of having these snowballing powers is well countered by the mindblowing number of enemies that will eventually be swarming your way. As they’re all moving directly for you, you learn to manipulate the movement of these vast swarms, like the inverse of a dog herding sheep. You kite them around, cut through the weakest enemies to get out of tight situations, then loop back round to pick up the various bits that they drop.
Of course, you’ll get overwhelmed sooner or later, and once you do it’s Game Over and back to square one, though in true roguelike fashion you get to unlock new characters, new abilities to use next time out, and purchase various permanent upgrades to your character using the coin you pick up in a round.
What’s wonderful about Vampire Survivors is that not only do I not think about it too much after I play it, but I also stop obsessing over whatever it was that I was playing just before it. I’ll usually just jump in for one or two runs, and come away from it with this feeling of clarity, like coming out of a micro-meditation, ready to move on to whatever other activities I have planned – games or otherwise.
Something about Vampire Survivors serves as a palette cleanser, a memory wipe, or that feature you’d get on plasma TVs where it ‘scanned’ the screen with a white line to get rid of any screen burn-in from whatever you’ve just been watching. I don’t play much mobile games these days, but it has the same kind of effect a good clicker game, even though you’re not really clicking at all. Incidentally, Vampire Survivors itself should be coming to Android at some point, and has spawned quite a few mobile knock-offs, including Magic Survival.
If you find that those ‘big’ games you play tend to follow you through life, and through your interactions with random people who couldn’t care less about your space colony in Rimworld or the number of sexual dalliances you’re having in Crusader Kings, then I suggest you start playing Vampire Survivors to give yourself a brain wipe. It may actually prove good for you.
It’s constantly improving too, and a month never goes by when there aren’t bosses and other features being added. The latest update, for instance, added a cheat menu as well as a couple of new characters to play as. Yep, you can literally go into a menu now and type in cheat codes to unlock powers and features – it’s like 1998 all over again!
Whether you’re coming out of a battle royale match that you came tantalisingly close to winning but are now dwelling on your defeat, or can’t shake thinking about the world as a hex-based grid after hours-long sessions in Civilization, Vampire Survivors is the perfect antidote. And at just a few bucks on Steam or free if you have PC Game Pass, it’s a pretty cheap one too!
