I’m not criticizing, I am the OP after all, I’m one of those using a 3060 to play this game. 1080p only though, not glorious 4K.
I started this through Game Pass yesterday. I’d mostly been able to avoid spoilers, so I didn’t really know what kind of game to expect.
What a cool feeling right? When you start a game like this, and it’s so different and delightful. That’s got to be the best first impression I’ve gotten from a game in a long, long time.
I wish they’d spaced out the achievements more though. From my very first game, I got 8 achievements yesterday. I like my achievements to be drip fed to me slowly. This felt like I overdosed and was lying in a pool of my own dopamine.
Great thread title by the way. That’s the first thought I had when I finally realized what the gameplay actually was: How did no one think of this before? It’s genius.
Wait’ll you get to the library! Well, assuming “pool of my own dopamine” equates 1:1 with “onscreen density of XP gems.”
Sorry, I wasn’t even really singling you out specifically, it’s just your turn to post this sentiment was the straw that made me finally post a reply! :)
I also just completed the Library on my first go-around. Monsters can’t kill what they can’t touch, so garlic + bibles is really fricken powerful.
It makes sense when you think about it, vampirewise.
Garlic is pretty badass from the second upgrade onwards, bibles need a little more to become really devastating.
The best part is that dozens have thought of it since!
Funnily enough, the garlic and the bible are two of the weakest weapons in the game long-term.
Also, it’s funny that people think the game looking lo-fi means it has low spec requirements - as it is, because the game is currently built in Electron, you need good hardware if you want to play extended runs with endgame conditions. One of the stats you can upgrade, curse, increases enemy strength, HP, spawn rate, and spawn count, and the last two increases mean it’s well worth upgrading curse to maximize XP gains. This is where the game effectively stops being playable on Steam Deck - when you’re running around with effectively a 7x multiplier to the enemy count and spawn rate, and in hyper mode (significant speed increase for everything except the timer) on top of that, you need a solid machine to keep up. With all that said, the new engine port that’s been in development for a while should massively improve things for basically all hardware profiles.
The achievements get much harder. There’s a whole mess of them that require you to get to level 99 with each character in a run, which takes some work to get them all.
Yep. Garlic is super appealing to new players and is great as you learn the game. Later you probably won’t take it as much. I still sometimes take the bible though, because the evolved one is fun to run into crowds like a giant sawblade.
So I just started playing this today and I got to the 30 minute mark and some grim reaper dude showed up and kicked my ass in 8 seconds. He was on me like a rat on a Cheeto and I couldn’t shake him.
Really fun game though.
That’s a phenomenal first run.
Thanks! It wasn’t my very first run; I did have a handful before that. Everything really clicked on this one though and I got to the point where just about anything that came near me went up like popcorn, and even if anything did manage to get a hit on me I was able to heal myself almost instantly with the Bloody Tear. Super satisfying.
Once I started getting surrounded by hundreds of those glowy-outlined bats I had to be a little more careful with moving through them too fast, but even those weren’t a problem, and I was able to collect a ton of red gems off of them.
I was extremely impressed by how effective the Cross and Bible were together. It made me feel like I was playing my old Hammerdin in D2. At high level, Garlic completely neutralizes weak enemies and I guess took care of anything that made it through the two other aforementioned skills. I don’t think I care for the axe much.
I’m gonna have to figure out how to take care of that end boss though without getting touched. It was just kind of a shock to go from an unstoppable force of nature to oh shit I’m dead in a few seconds.
This is by design. Levels have a 30 minute time limit. He shows up and you’ll die. There’s ways of prolonging that overtime, but the run is over.
Death can be killed, but yes. You certainly aren’t expected to the first time you meet him.
For some reason the Library is a lot easier than the Mad Forest for me. I made it to 29:54 my second run there, while I can never make it past 20 minutes in the forest.
The library is definitely the easiest stage - great for farming before you’re powerful enough to go infinite. It’s a lot harder to get swarmed with enemies only coming at you from two directions.
I didn’t know you could upgrade your character with the gold you’ve accrued so that’s cool. That aspect (along with the sound design) kind of reminds me of 10000000 and You Must Build a Boat. I checked to see if they were made by the same person, but it doesn’t appear that way (though they’re both named Luca, strangely enough).
Either way, I started on the Library today and after a couple weak runs I decided to try maxing out Knife and holy shit once you evolve that into Thousand Edge it becomes an absolute firehose of carnage. I felt absolutely unstoppable and mostly had to concern myself with the most efficient way of gathering gems, but then at 25:18 I died with a big, nasty boss bearing down on me on one side and an enormous wall of giant bats on the other.
Really disappointing, because it felt like there was no way I was going to be stopped. The fact that there are walls on top and bottom felt like it gave me fewer opportunities to escape bad situations. I did get to Level 66, though, and I think I can beat it if I’m a bit smarter about staying mobile and not getting myself too surrounded.
Yeah, I also feel reminded of 10000000 and You Must Build a Boat.
I really enjoy games like that, although I wish this hadn’t been hyped as much as it is. Some folks are making it out to be the greatest thing anyone has come up with a million years, but it’s incredibly simple, and as a dopamine release mechanism, it also feels very familiar.
It’s certainly good, but it isn’t new.
Whenever I play a game like this, it transports me back to the heyday of Kongregate where you could cycle through a hundred awesome little games, and gorge yourself on the cool little gameplay loops people had come up with, within a really short amount of time. Vampire Survivors feels like one of those.
