There’s not much I can really say about Vampire Survivors that hasn’t already been said endlessly. It’s outstanding, it’s unashamedly weird, it’s its own de-make, and most importantly it is an impeccably designed prototypical specimen of the mutant subgenre of game it ushered into the world.

I loved the game’s incongruety between the plausibly mathematically provable perfect systems design and early 2000s flash game aesthetic. I struggle to think of anything else that comes close without the graphics being limited by hardware of the time, maybe SNKRX, one of my 2021 picks of best of the year.

I just super super respect a developer confident enough (and correct) that the merits of their game concept and design are so exceptional that they don’t just stand on their own, it’s so well designed that they can actively undermine the game through how it looks and STILL succeed because it’s THAT GOOD.

I’m not yet sure what to think about the clones that are already following. Most are shameless, mapping the gameplay systems directly onto a generic isometric template in Unity. There’s going to definitely be interesting stuff in the space of games inspired by Vampire Survivors,