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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Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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