A while back, Ed Thorn wrote a lovely article for RPS asking why there aren’t more games about running. I was thinking about this last week while playing Vampire Survivors, when I realized there was at least one game I knew about running: Vampire Survivors.
I know that on the surface, Vampire Survivor isn’t strictly a run. It’s about being a well-equipped magical hero against hordes of undead horrors. but! One of the things that fascinates me about running is that it’s a morphing engine. It turns things into other things. It turns time into distance and distance into time. I’m slow, so in the park near my house, a lap of football field becomes a unit of time (90 seconds), and a football field over three laps becomes a distance (about a kilometer). But running can do it for all kinds of things. Music becomes time, time becomes distance. Roxy Music’s “Mother of Pearl” is a six-minute substitution, or four laps of a football field. A typical New York Times daily podcast is less than 5k. It all came together and confused myself.
So listen up: Vampire survivors are one thing. Vampire Survivor is a very pure, very focused action RPG. You move a pixelated character through a simple top-down environment that is steadily filled with enemies. Your character will auto-attack, so you just wander around avoiding direct contact with enemies while keeping them in damage range. Enemies drop experience orbs for you to collect when they die, and as you level up, you can spend your experience on randomly chosen new attacks or perks or buffs. Of course, these attacks are all automatic as well, and within five minutes you’ve gone from choosing a subtle path around two or three enemies to absolutely roaring through waves of things, with magical attacks bursting all over the place. what is it like? It’s like being an experience ball Roomba. It’s like having a horrific fire at a fireworks factory and taking a walk on a Sunday. Or just like running.
Because one thing becomes another. This makes choosing a perk or power-up very confusing right from the start. Simply put: damage boost or speed boost? Well, I thought, if I move faster and fire faster, don’t I get the speed boost at the same time as the damage boost? New weapons or more killing experience? Well, if I gain more experience, do I need to kill people faster in the first place? Speed becomes damage, experience becomes damage. If you think about it, damage is also a speed.
These are the thoughts that came to me while playing Vampire Survivors, because Vampire Survivors is both exciting and terribly boring, and encourages that breathless mobius loop of Stoner thinking. That said, it’s pretty boring in a good way: it allows the mind to wander, pondering strange connections and unlikely pairings. The more you practice, the more you can play and the better you play, so the longer you play, the more you earn and the more you unlock, which means your next run will make you stronger and play longer! Vampire survivors are clearly the purest expression of the psychic impulse in game design.
The gist of the game is all of these things. You are downgraded to a weak level, you start killing enemies automatically, by killing you get stronger and more enemies. But there are some complications that make vampire survivors really smart, I think. On the one hand, you’re always unlocking stuff, hitting secret trigger points in terms of kills, or staying alive for a while, or leveling up something. You unlock new characters, new play areas – my favorite is actually the second one, a long and narrow library, which is a mesmerizing rhythm change after free roaming open areas – and discoveries in the game ‘s new spell game. But more: New game modes – Super Mode, Reverse Mode. New modifier for actions. Pause the map on the menu!
These things are great, but the best things come from weapon evolution and guilds. The spells and weapons you choose as you level up are one of the important elements of freedom and expression in Vampire Survivor. They are what makes one run different from another. Maybe the first run you focus on the bible that revolves around you, and you level it up when it’s offered, rather than investing in a bunch of different attacks. Late-game vampire survivors are very different from late-game vampire survivors when you wield a spinning bible, and you go bombing seagulls, flames, or axes that fly into the air and then roll off the screen.
So it’s the beginning of self-expression, but over time you’ll find that you can evolve weapons and turn them into other things. Pair the whip with the right support item and you can turn it into a giant purple beast that deals tons of damage. Pair fire with herbs that – I think – increase damage and upgrade both, and your fire turns into a giant burning skull.
What does this add? It shapes your path in the game. Each turn will give you some random spells early on that you can choose and possibly follow along an evolutionary or joint path. Or maybe you avoided the path and ended up with a bunch of weird spells and weapons, none of which were unions. Both methods are legal and will take you to an interesting place. Because late in the game, when the screen is always full of fascination with enemies, danger, or opportunity, you start to realize that the spells you have are almost like brushes in an art bag, or tools in a garden shed. What shape do you want to carve out of the endless bad guys? straight line? arc? Do you want to freeze and then smash? Do you want to send a wave of death – and damage numbers on the RPG screen – rippling through the waves of oncoming monsters? How will your loadout handle the boss?
I think about it all while playing. I figured what am I going to unlock next, what evolution am I aiming for, where does the next chest and coin boost come from. Garlic comes to my mind, it’s my favorite attack that does a small circle of damage around you so you can nudge yourself against enemies like a cat nudges you with its head when it’s about to make a fuss. I think of popcorn, that’s how vampire survivors sound, and every monster death sounds like another slice of corn popped in the microwave until the whole thing reaches a buttery crescendo.
I consider running. This wave is over, the boss is over, and new characters or items are unlocked. I really should turn off the computer and run. Maybe. Or maybe go one more time, one more choice, one more chance to confuse speed with damage with experience.
