Vampire Survivors - Any port in a storm

Let's go back sixteen years, to 2007. Why 2007? Because it was the last year with no clouds, every field had good products, both physical and digital, but we are only interested in the gaming industry. It's hard to believe that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl, Bioshock, Portal, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and Assassin's Creed all came out in the same year. It's hard to believe that games like The Darkness and Clive Barker's Jericho got so deeply lost in the information flow of hits that they weren't appreciated until years later...

Looking back at our time, when Resident Evil: Village sings the praises of Resident Evil, but the game is only worthy of moderate praise; when the release line is increasingly flashed with the coddled "Remake" and "Remastered"; when games like Loop Hero pay off tenfold. At that point, you realize that the current gaming industry is a joke of two chairs: one has hollowed out pictures and $70-90 worth of emptiness, the other has unsightly games with laughable visuals. Would a gamer from 2007 believe that in 2022 this game would get 98% positive reviews on Steam:

Well this is still the beginning, and if you tell the gamer of the past that the screenshot above is the beginning of the game. In 25 minutes the game will look like this:

Most likely, a gamer from the past would laugh in your face and go to try out the newly purchased Xbox 360. But the reality is this.

It's scary to think about the future. What if the cyberpunk we invented remains a fantasy? We would travel to the office in horse-drawn carriages, and the most popular professions would be "barber" and "coachman". They will be paid in the same way - in gold, only in digital...

Like a motivational movie

A modern game needs only one or two mechanics to find its calling. While multibillion companies were making their AAA projects, a certain British programmer named Luca Galante was creating his Vampire Survivors without much hope or ambition. Luca was no genius, had no impressive experience in development, only eyes burning - to create something and gather a community around this "something". And as practice shows, this was enough to succeed.

Of the prerequisites for success, Luca had only admin on the Ultima Online server and work on slots in the online casino. Development of Vampire Survivors lasted only a year and cost $1250. But it was not an instant success...

Simplicity and depth in one bottle

Vampire Survivors is shot only because it is a game with elementary gameplay, but with a number of fancy nuances. The controls don't even include attack buttons, your task is to create a maximally versatile human and survive for 30 minutes. For half an hour you have all sorts of evil things coming at you from all sides. Vampire Survivors is all right with variety: from simple bats to elite enemies, praying mantises, and living plants. You start to think about the variety of local fauna at the exact moment when a bat in a birch halo appears on the map. For some reason it refuses to die with a single blow, and after its death a mysterious chest is left on the battlefield.

The chest contains some coins and weapons. Not fully aware of the importance of our find, we insert the contents of the chest into the passive skills window, let's say it's garlic. Now a faint eagle appears around our hero, apparently the stench from the garlic is so strong that it distorts the air. We approach the bat, and it falls down dead from just the smell, and to our mind, we thought: "Funny, the whole game will pass with garlic. But it was not there, on the field already wandering zombies, who, though the stench is crooked, but back into the graves of the smell is not in a hurry. You think, "Garlic must be weak. You wander the field, picking up blue experience crystals, and suddenly notice that your glorious daggers are scattering enemies on the approaches to your character. The lion's share of experience is just lying around the edges of the location. As you collect experience crystals, the timer greedily counts down the seconds, and for each level you are presented with a seemingly simple choice between three things:

A thought comes to your mind: "What's more profitable: pumping the items you already have or pumping more of them?

As early as the twentieth minute, you begin to understand the meaning of "Luck" and "Magnet" characteristics. It turns out that the character with them swings a lot faster, and if you add "Greed" to the whole thing, you'll get the coins in spades. However, you overdid it, you gathered too greedy build, and on the fifteenth minute you were crushed by the meat. You enter the previously incomprehensible menu:

You realize that a couple or three races like this and you'll be able to put together a killing machine. But here's the problem: Swing your combat skills for damage per second or your meta boosting skills? Be patient and then feel rich, or try to get through this silly game with a bang?

You choose the second option just to get through another game, tick the imaginary box and move on to more interesting games. But that's not the case. Last game ended at 12 minutes, the next game ended at 12:46. This game provokes you!

And here you are already going into "Google", typing something like "How to pass Vampire Survivors fast", and you're bombarded with some guides, some builds, some assemblies. It turns out that the first couple of times you played with items with no synergy. You should have expanded the garlic area, then it would have repelled enemies. You also liked Holy Water, which you ignored at first. You said it was designed for area damage. Maybe you already had experience in MMOs, albeit minimal, you remember the law: for PvP take spells on a single target, for PvE - on the area. Here you fit into the guide, but you run into a new difficulty - your character is not honed for area damage:

Well, that's okay. A couple of games and you've got the right character in your pocket, then a couple more runs and you've got the right passive abilities, too. In just two or three hours, you're bound to write a review like, "I don't understand why so many people are playing this. The world has gone crazy!"

You play for another three hours, buy the right enhancements, the right character, and some much needed passive skills. Turns out, with each new purchase their price increases, you had to play a couple more games. But no worries, it's a spinoff game, no effort required.

Here you are collecting the desired character, collect the successful in your opinion items and victoriously go to conquer the game, but again die. This time on the fifteenth minute. You exit the game, reach for the delete button, but you notice a whole pile of achievements and rewards for your efforts. With a languid sigh, you go back into the game. It turns out that achievements in Vampire Survivors are not something nominal, but something applied. After spending another five minutes of your precious time, you explore new items and count coins. For fun, you try again...

...Suddenly you feel emotionally uplifted. You don't realize it, but the game has already managed to fill you up with in-game rewards that your brain perceives as real. For the first time in four hours of play, you even like the game!

Is it worth it?

Vampire Survivors looks like it came out before the invention of the Internet, and you can play the game for free on the same Internet. The session lasts up to half an hour, so it's worth a try. Vampire Survivors is not Loop Hero, which reveals its charm only after an hour or two, not Darkest Dungeon, where you get fined for mistakes. Vampire Survivors is not an indie game that obligates you to do anything, not even to buy it. So why not? No one knows when the video game industry will surprise you again with its scope, and for a fish out of water...