I've put almost forty hours into Vampire Survivor, a bullet-hell roguelike with pixelated graphics and a nostalgic Castlevania theme so obvious that they released an official Castlevania DLC. Gameplay consists of wandering around an expansive map while ever-increasing waves of enemies attack. Your character auto-attacks, so all you have to do is move and chose from a huge selection of active weapons and passive powerups that random chance offers you every time you level up. If you pair the right weapon with the right passive ability, you'll eventually evolve your weapon into a stronger form. This is gameplay in a nutshell--Vampire Survivors is a very simple game--but the sheer amount of unlockables, from weapons, stages, characters, and relics (items on the map the confer a permanent bonus; e.g., a map, the ability to reroll random weapon/passive ability drops) ensures that you'll always have a reason for another run. The dopamine rush from having your character absolutely annihilate hundreds of enemies--their deaths leaving behind gems of various shades that serve as experience--is very real, and I've often wondered whether Vampire Survivor can be considered a manipulative game. Its designer worked in the casino industry and you can tell. When you kill a boss, a chest will drop that contains anywhere from three to five random rewards. A little piece of crescendoing music plays and fireworks shoot out of the chest, increasing your anticipation. Were there predatory microtransactions, I would think I'd hate this game, but Vampire Survivors is like a gambling ode to the simple games of the NES generation. It doesn't have a story or high production values. It simply massages your lizard brain and lets you relax and forget America's downward spiral into authoritarianism (putting out the positive vibes!).
Contrast the simple mechanics/indie production values of Vampire Survivor with God of War: Ragnarok, Sony's big-budget sequel to their 2018 God of War reboot. Ragnarok is a perfect example of a modern triple-A singleplayer game. It's gorgeous, well-voice acted, plays well, and is about as safe a sequel as you could imagine. Developers Santa Monica have added very little new from a gameplay perspective, other than more time playing as Atreus, who serves as the story's focal point. The narrative tension between Kratos and Atreus from the first game is absent, even though Ragnarok tries to replicate this dynamic. Kartos's story from GOW 2018 is just more interesting--Atreus finding his place in the Norse pantheon isn't as compelling as wondering whether Kratos will learn how to parent his son or revert to the monster he was in the original games. Without a really compelling story, Ragnarok becomes just a series of little dungeons and simple puzzles. I wish they'd tinkered with the camera or given Kratos some of his old powers back, or maybe made Atreus more fun to play. It's not that I don't like the game--I've spent almost thirty hours in Ragnarok--but it feels like something I've played before. It's interesting that an indie title like Vampire Survivor can suck up more of my time than a big budget action game like God of War, but that seems to be the situation. Sometimes all we need is a little reversion to the basics. Still, I'd like to commend the PC port of Ragnarok, because it runs really well (triple digit framerates at 1440p maxed out with DLAA on an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 7 5800x), especially seeing how Spider-man 2's PC port is such a disaster.
God of War: Ragnarok screenshots below (because they're so pretty):
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