Game Theory: Yes, please, bring on the Vampire Survivors clones

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

---

We’re bobbing up and down in a tiny pocket of air at the moment, in terms of the Big Video Games Of 2024 Release Calendar—trapped between the release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth late last month, and the coming of Capcom’s long-gestating Dragon’s Dogma 2 next week. Which means we’ve got just a teensy gap in which to talk about one of our low-key favorite trends of the first quarter of the year so far: The rise of games shamelessly ripping off Luca Galante’s Vampire Survivors. All hail the Survivors-like!

If you’ve never played Vampire Survivors—well, what the hell is your deal, huh? It’s on basically everything by now, it runs pretty well on phones, it costs $5, and it’s incredibly, horrifically addictive, pitting your tiny, pixelated, legally-not-a-Castlevania character against huge hordes of monsters in a very satisfying way. Despite its love of sending literally hundreds of goofy skeletons at you at once, though, VS’s big innovation was actually one of simplicity: Removing the “shoot” button from a game largely about shooting. (And whipping. And knifing. And, like, caring for birds that then circle around you, dropping carpet bombs on werewolves.)

That, more than anything, denotes the nascent Survivors-like genre—which got its latest expression in the form of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, a very canny attempt by Funday Games to translate the multiplayer mining mayhem of Ghost Ship Games’ ridiculously fun co-op game Deep Rock Galactic into this decidedly single-player space. Both of these Survivor/s games start from the assumption that, since you’re going to be shooting as often as possible in a game like this—where armies of monsters/alien bugs are racing toward you pretty much all the time—they might as well take that chore out of your hands, and focus your mind on things like movement, placement, and navigating around obstacles. (To say nothing of accommodating the quirks of your various guns/pieces of mining equipment/holy texts.)

It sounds overly simplistic at first—and can round up back to it if developers aren’t careful, with late-game Vampire Survivors often devolving into standing in one place while your hand-crafted lawnmower wipes out hundreds of bats per second in a glorious/tedious cataclysm of auto-fire. But when it’s working, it forces you to think about things like movement, weapon selection, and strategy in really interesting ways, without getting bogged down in the mechanics of clicking a “fire” button a thousand times.

DRG: Survivor plays into those mechanics in a really interesting way, too, by adapting one of the base Deep Rock Galactic’s coolest features: The deformable terrain that allows you to mine your own path through its massive subterranean levels. The Survivors version isn’t quite so robust—you’re trapped on a single 2D plane, so no tunneling out your own little vertical murder holes—but the tension of desperately cutting through solid rock to get to a place of safety while a wave of exploding bugs breathes down your neck is still exhilarating.

But also, it’s just neat to see how easily different themes can be applied to this base “pick weapons, upgrade them, move around, survive” mechanic, while still feeling notably distinct. DRG: Survivor plays like Vampire Survivors only in its basic wireframe, with actual gameplay, in our experience, being a lot more frenetic, thanks to the basic aggression levels of the bugs trying to devour your silly, dumb dwarf face. (The addition of elemental damage, and having the game’s four classes each have access to a pretty diverse set of guns, helps too. Vampire Survivors characters aren’t terribly distinct, more often than not, but each dwarf feels like his own sets of powers and challenges.)

Gaming is an inherently iterative medium, with the entire history of the art form made up of creators building on other people’s good ideas for play. (By all accounts, DRG: Survivor literally came about because of two developers talking about how damn fun Galante’s game was over a beer.) And indie spaces, more than anywhere, are where this kind of germination happens—someone plays your game, has an idea for how to make it stranger, or harder, or just more fun, and makes their own thing inspired by it. (See, for instance, the huge number of indie games, many of them wildly creative, that have taken direct inspiration from the card-based Slay The Spire over the last seven years.) You can chalk it up to marketing or imitation, if you’re feeling cynical—Ghost Ship Games put Survivor in their new game’s title for a purpose, after all. But this is how things like “genre” happen, and it’s exciting to see such an inherently enjoyable one start to get its feet under itself as 2024 progresses.