A while back, Ed Thorn wrote a lovely piece for RPS asking why there weren’t more games about running. I was pondering this last week, playing Vampire Survivors, when I realised that there was at least one game about running I knew about: Vampire Survivors.
Vampire Survivors reviewPublisher: PoncleDeveloper: PonclePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC
I know that on the surface Vampire Survivors isn’t strictly about running. It’s about being a sort of tooled-up magical hero taking on hordes of undead horrors. And yet! One of the things that fascinates me about running is how it’s a sort of metamorphosis engine. It takes things and turns them into other things. It turns time into distance, and distance into time. I am slow, so one circuit of a football pitch in the park near my house becomes a unit of time (90 seconds) while just over three circuits of the football pitch is turned back into distance (just about a kilometre). But running does this for all sorts of things. Music becomes time, which becomes distance. Roxy Music’s Mother of Pearl is six minutes and change, or just over four circuits of the football pitch. The typical New York Times Daily Podcast is just under a 5k. It all flows together and muddles itself.
So listen: Vampire Survivors is kind of the same thing. Vampire Survivors is a very pure, very focused slice of action RPG. You move a pixelly character around a simple top-downish environment that steadily fills with enemies. Your character attacks automatically so you just wander around, avoiding directly connecting with enemies while putting them within damage range. Enemies drop experience orbs when they die for you to collect, and when you level up you get to spend your experience on a random choice of new attacks or perks or buffs. The attacks will all be automatic too, of course, and within five minutes you’ve gone from picking a delicate path around two or three foes to absolutely roaring through waves of the things, magic attacks bursting out all over the place. What’s it like? It’s like being an experience orb Roomba. It’s like taking a terrible conflagration in a fireworks factory out for a nice Sunday walk. Or it’s like running.
Because one thing becomes another. And this makes picking a perk or power-up pretty confusing from the off. Simply put: damage boost or speed boost? Well, I reckon, if I’m moving faster and firing faster, aren’t I kind of getting a damage boost at the same time as a speed boost? A new weapon or more experience from kills? Well, if I’m getting more experience, do I need to kill people quicker in the first place? Speed becomes damage, experience becomes damage. Damage which is also, if you think about it, a form of speed.