Editorials
Why ‘Vampire Survivors’ is 2022’s First Breakout Horror Game Hit
Looking at screenshots of Vampire Survivors, the first surprise breakout hit of 2022, it’s very easy to be completely confused by what you’re seeing. From a glance, you can clearly see the Castlevania inspiration dripping from every pixel, but that’s about it. Much like the bullet hells that inspire it, you can easily get lost in the large number of enemies and projectiles that clutter the screen. But once you get your first round in, while you won’t understand a lot of the higher-level systems at work, reading the screen becomes second nature.
The pitch for Vampire Survivors is a bit of a strange one. On the surface, it’s most reminiscent of a twin-stick shooter with one key difference: you’re not in control of when you attack. Instead, each of your attacks is automated on a cooldown. As you level up during your session, you can either add new attacks to your arsenal or enhance existing ones.
The rush of going from someone who starts just attacking horizontally with a whip once every few seconds to a whirling dervish of lighting, holy water, and magic bibles is an absolute joy to watch. And while it may sound like it may get too easy as you become an automatic monster slayer, the sheer amount of enemies the game throws at you is more than enough to keep you on your toes.
At first glance, the game seems deceptively simple, but it’s built on a series of incredibly smart design decisions. When starting, I was perplexed at the choice to make the attacks automated, but then I realized it simplified one of the biggest challenges I have with bullet hells. In a normal twin-stick shooter, you have to split your attention between trying to dodge incoming attacks and aiming to destroy enemies. By taking attacks out of your hands, it frees you up to solely focus on navigation and dodging. Enemies don’t shoot, they just walk directly towards you at a constant speed, but it still captures the spirit of a wild pattern of projectiles in a bullet hell that you need to weave in and out of.
This focus is made doubly critical by forcing you to walk over crystals left behind by enemies to gain the precious XP you need to upgrade your character. It incentivizes you to run into the enemies or find clever ways to double back on areas you’ve passed through in order to collect, keeping you from just constantly trying to retreat in one direction to survive.
Equally important as your dodging reflexes in Vampire Survivors are the decisions you make with your character build throughout your session. You’ll start with some basic stats depending on which character you start with, and each time you level up you’ll get a chance to select one of three randomly chosen weapons/items to add to your character. Selecting a new weapon will add that attack to your cooldown rotation, diversifying your methods of attack, but picking one you already own will upgrade it, enhancing it in various ways including more projectiles or extra damage.
Getting a wide variety of weapons can be important because they all operate in meaningfully different ways. For example, the knife will shoot out in the direction you’re walking, while the lightning ring will call down lightning on random enemies. There doesn’t seem to be any one combination that’s overpowered, and it’s always thrilling to find a new combination in Vampire Survivors that feels satisfying to wield.
The art style takes clear inspiration from old Castlevania titles, filling the screens with pixel art ghosts, skeletons, and all manner of supernatural creatures. None of the designs stand out as overly gorgeous or inspired, but the game is very importantly readable. For a game that has so many enemies on screen, they are all visually distinct, allowing you to quickly recognize them and know how tough they will be to kill.
Overall meta progression in Vampire Survivors is handled through a combination of objective-based unlocks and one purchased with coins that give permanent upgrades to whatever character you select. It’s a very smart choice to not overwhelm the player with the wide gamut of weapons, forcing them to be familiar with the starting ones before adding complexity to the game. The coin-based unlocks can feel a bit slow as the costs are high for starting players, but once your runs start getting longer you’ll be unlocking upgrades at a fairly steady pace.
If this feels like a rather systemic breakdown of the game, it’s because it’s easy to explain the nuts and bolts of Vampire Survivors, but hard to capture the feeling. All these elements are very familiar, but the way they meld together into a unique experience needs to be felt firsthand. There’s wonderful zen of watching your character progress up that power curve, but even when you’re in the zone one slip up can make it fall apart in seconds.
It’s still in Early Access, so I’m very curious to see how adding additional weapons, items or characters will create new synergies during play. If you’re someone who’s usually wary of Early Access games, this one has a low barrier to entry: the Steam version is only $3, and you can play it free in a browser on their itch.io page.
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It’s been 75 years since The Thing From Another World first warned us to “watch the skies”, and filmgoers have done just that by showing up to multiple instances of extraterrestrial contact on the big screen. This makes sense, as a recent CBS news poll estimated that 63% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets, and the ongoing disclosure movement aims to raise that number with each passing day.
With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day leaving many genre fans hungry for more alien footage (preferably of the spooky variety), today I’d like to share a list recommending six underrated alien invasion thrillers for your viewing pleasure. After all, regardless of whether or not you believe that we’re alone in the universe, it can be fun to dream about the worst-case scenario if our cosmic neighbors ever decide to visit.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be focusing on lesser-known invasion stories rather than the popular extraterrestrials of franchises like Alien and Close Encounters of the Third (or even Fourth) Kind. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own alien favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling movie.
While it won’t be featured in this article, I’d highly recommend checking out Dean Alioto’s UFO Abduction/The McPherson Tape if you’re up for some ufology-inspired found footage thrills.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. The Arrival (1996)
Not to be confused with Denis Villeneuve’s Academy Award-winning Amy Adams vehicle about learning to communicate peacefully with extraterrestrial life, David Twohy’s The Arrival is a much more straightforward (but no less entertaining) genre romp where Charlie Sheen faces a global conspiracy involving hostile alien invaders.
It’s not exactly up there with Close Encounters or even Independence Day, but Twohy’s conspiratorial thriller plays out like an exceptionally fun episode of The X-Files that I’d recommend to sci-fi/horror fans who don’t mind a little bit of wonky CGI and 90s excess alongside their alien thrills.
5. Extraterrestrial (2014)
The Vicious Brothers made a name for themselves with the success of 2011’s Grave Encounters, but that was far from the Canadian duo’s only collaboration. And while it’s not exactly a fan favorite, I always point out 2014’s Extraterrestrial as one of their most underrated projects simply because I agree with the filmmakers’ opinion that there aren’t enough ‘cool alien abduction movies’ out there.
Admittedly, the majority of the picture functions like a run-of-the-mill creature feature with paper-thin characters and familiar horror tropes, but I’d argue that the cosmically-terrifying final act elevates the experience to new and memorable heights. The movie also boasts great performances by both Michael Ironside and Emily Perkins – a combination that more than makes up for the occasionally janky CGI.
4. Alien Raiders (2008)
Director Ben Rock has gone on record lamenting how his John-Carpenter-inspired creature feature was forcefully renamed from Supermarket to the painfully obvious Alien Raiders (a change which likely resulted in many potential viewers skipping out on the experience), but the new title doesn’t change the fact that this single-location thriller is something of a hidden gem.
Taking place entirely within a supermarket, Alien Raiders tells the story of an ensemble of customers and employees who are taken hostage by a group of armed men looking for something far more dangerous than an easy payout. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but I’d highly recommend this criminally underseen flick to fans of John Carpenter and the Resident Evil games.
3. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
You’d think that a Ridley-Scott-produced retelling of one of the most infamous real-life UFO sightings of all time would have a bigger following, but I rarely see Justin Barber’s Found Footage period piece brought up during discussions about extraterrestrial-focused horror movies.
This is a huge shame, as Phoenix Forgotten is just as spooky as it is convincing, with this well-researched dive into the Phoenix Lights incident benefiting from surprisingly believable special effects as well as an appropriately horrific finale.
2. Communion (1989)
I wouldn’t blame you for disregarding Whitley Strieber’s controversial book about his alleged close encounter as sensationalist slop, but I’d argue that Phillipe Mora’s 1989 adaptation of these events is much better than the source material. After all, the movie works as a standalone piece of speculative fiction while also benefiting from an incredible performance by the one and only Christopher Walken!
Mora’s take on Communion may not be particularly scary, but the film is still an unforgettable character study regardless of whether or not the abduction really happened. Not only that, but the flick also paved the way for plenty of future sci-fi stories where the extraterrestrial invaders aren’t as evil as they initially appear.
1. Altered (2006)
Originally envisioned as a Sam Raimi-style horror-comedy titled Probed, Eduardo Sánchez (of The Blair Witch Project fame) eventually realized that it would be much more interesting to turn the film into a serious exploration of the emotional aftermath of a traumatic abduction incident.
That’s how we got Altered, a clever inversion of the standard abduction narrative that follows a group of troubled friends as they capture and experiment on an alien in order to enact revenge for their own abduction years prior.
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