Vampire Survivors: the three-dollar game with a BAFTA

Vampire Survivors was made by one person, Luca Galante, working as poncle. It entered early access in December 2021, released in full on 20 October 2022 for Windows and macOS, reached Xbox that November, phones that December, Switch in August 2023 and PlayStation in August 2024. In 2023 it took the BAFTA for Best Game and for Game Design, ahead of projects with nine-figure budgets.

It cost about three dollars at launch and looked like an asset flip: pixel sprites in old Castlevania dress, a hasty interface, looping music. That is exactly what makes it useful for a conversation about what a game is actually made of.

The button that is not there

You control movement only. Weapons fire on their own, each on its own interval and in its own direction: the whip strikes horizontally ahead, garlic damages a ring around you, the bible orbits, the knife flies where you face. Attacking does not exist as an action. Only position does.

The whole game grows out of that. Since you do not deal damage but radiate it, the single decision available every second is where to stand. The crowd closes into a ring, you cut a corridor through it and tow the tail behind you; garlic works while enemies are close, the whip works while they are lined up. Twenty minutes in there are several hundred silhouettes on screen and you have stopped seeing them individually — you read the shape of the crowd the way you read a current.

Thirty minutes is the design

A run lasts 15, 20 or 30 minutes depending on the stage, and that is not a timer for the sake of one. Progression is arranged so that you are helpless for five minutes, coping by ten, and by twenty you are a mincing machine filling half the screen with light. The game deliberately drives you to a state where difficulty ceases to exist — and ends the run precisely when that becomes boring. When the clock runs out Death arrives and kills you in seconds, whatever you are carrying.

Most games fear the moment the player has become too strong. Vampire Survivors makes that moment the reward and sets an alarm clock on it.

Six weapon slots and six passive slots. A fully upgraded weapon paired with the right item evolves into something else — but only if you open a chest afterwards. That is where the tension of building comes from: you are not picking the best option from a list, you are racing to finish a combination before the clock does.

What does not work

Unlocks. Half the content sits behind conditions that are nowhere properly explained, and for the first few hours you are not playing the game so much as guessing what it wants. The crossover DLC — Castlevania, Contra, Among Us — is made with obvious affection but finishes the job of turning the menus into a junk drawer.

And honesty requires this: the pleasure here is substantially chemical. Numbers rise, the screen floods with light, nothing is asked of you. A month later you find you have spent twenty hours in it and cannot recall a single one of them separately.

Why 8.0

For the purity of the idea, and because all the difficulty here is honestly located in design rather than production: there is nothing to look at and plenty to understand. Points off for the chaos of the unlock system and for the fact that after a hundred hours nothing remains except a habit. An eight is the grade for a thing that does exactly one thing, and does it better than anyone.