NOCLIP Pocket E76 - Attacked by a Chair - Vampire Survivors

Thank you, but the podcast is in another coffin. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re talking about Vampire Survivors, the game that seemingly everyone has played. Vampire Survivors released in a form of early access on PC and mobile, and grew a pretty large player base by the time it hit its official release last year and has since popularized a genre that it has become the blueprint for, coincidentally similar to its main inspiration, Castlevania. In a Survivors game, the player defeats hundreds (or thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of enemies to incrementally become stronger, in this case without any controls beyond movement, until the entire play area becomes a visual disaster of exploding projectiles and whips and skeletons and giant plants, etc. That absurd endgame, which only gets wilder as the game progresses, is the main driving force for the player like a bite sized roguelike where the goal is to outscale the challenges the game sets against you. And Vampire Survivors, in its simplicity, has really nailed what makes this work. There is very little input required from the player, meaning that outside of making decisions on how to build your character, and which character to build, the skill floor is very low. Anyone with the desire to beat this game can get to the point where they are clearing levels reliably eventually, and the steady drip of new content up to and including paid DLC means they will have new levels to clear and things to unlock for a long time. Combine that with the nostalgic homage to Castlevania and the sick ass soundtrack, and the picture of how this game is as much of a success as it is becomes pretty clear. We’re going to talk about the unlock system and how it compels you to keep playing the game, how characters and weapons impact your strategy and by how much, and we briefly discuss the merits of referring to this game as a walking simulator. Thank you for joining us again this week! We’re trying this new experiment this year called “play games Andy won’t like” and so far I think it’s gone pretty swimmingly. With Vampire Survivors being such a smash hit recently, did you pick it up? And if so, did you get a handle on the fuss, and what it was all about? Have you played other games in the budding genre? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, we’re going back to a game that’s been on our list for literally years, but felt appropriate (and short enough to help maintain our schedule), Jazzpunk! We hope you’ll join us for that.