Someone Else Made A Game Without Vampires In It
I haven’t finished Vampire Survivors and I don’t know if I ever will. Sometimes, I’m really bad at video games and it feels nice to be able to just say that without having to think about it, which is what this year has been for me. And it’s also wrapped into why I love Vampire Survivors so much.
Vampire Survivors came out in Early Access in December 2021, just a few weeks after I enter Early Access in a sense as well. In that time, both the game and myself have hit our 1.0. For me, it’s been a year of Hormone Replacement Therapy and choosing everything based on who I’ve always aimed to be. For both myself and Vampire Survivors, it’s been about applying updates and changes across various stages, all to be the best we can both possibly be.
My time with Vampire Survivors has been kind of messy, but in a good way, and so I want to talk more about why it resonated with me so much without focusing too closely on the granular parts of the game. You’ve read all of the reviews or you’ve been playing the game on your Steam Deck while wishing it was on Nintendo Switch, like everyone else. I’m not here to review Vampire Survivors or tell you to buy it. Vampire Survivors is one of the most-played games of the year. You probably already have and are. Instead, I want to talk about why it’s special and the wonderful thing it’s done for me. Video games are made by people, and so they always have the capabilities to transcend past dusty screens and through a part of us. All art can do this, but video games requiring some sort of player agency. Whether it be yours or someone else’s, it really adds an almost supernatural element.
In Vampire Survivors, you automatically attack. You don’t need to think about when to strike. In fact, you’re actually better off if you play passively. You can do well while intentionally moving the various playable characters and their weapon damage into and toward enemy paths. That’s an option you always have since you have absolute control over your character’s movement. But since your character automatically attacks, you’re free to focus on your character and their surroundings, all while weapon damage automatically comes from your character through melee, ranged, and/or magic attacks. This all depends on your equipped loadout, unlocks, and other boring boxes and numbers, but more on those later.
You can just move though, focusing on where you’re going, enjoy the pretty music, take in the pixel-powered sound effects, and quite literally just breathe in the atmosphere of this gorgeous game. Enemies will follow you and they’ll just kind of die, as long as you make sure you stay alive. By keeping your eyes on the experience points dropped from fallen enemies, collect items, and unlock chests along the way, you’ll consistently become more powerful, all without paying much attention to the enemies in your powerful wake. And look, it’s almost a meme at this point, how often trans women talk about being trans. But I just have to talk about some things that Vampire Survivors helped me realize, connect, and apply in my life, because that’s something games are capable of. Video games are neat.
I spent most of my life, thirty years actually, focusing on attacking, defending, and effectively smashing buttons, just so I could stay safe and… I guess keep going and not hitting a Game Over screen. My life was actually very much like a different game that feels like the complete opposite of Vampire Survivors before I transitioned - socially and medically. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was try to be. But the act of simply being just isn’t fulfilling or exciting. I Made a Game with Zombies in It might be fun and silly, but when the lights and music stop, it’s okay that a game focused on running, laughing, and attacking every moment to stay alive isn’t a person.
I needed to be a person, especially after thirty years of doing the opposite. With Vampire Survivors, being a fun game that doesn’t fight you on how you play it helped me do just that. At first I was frustrated because I loved this game but was experiencing so much friction with it. I was frustrated that I sucked at it. I still kind of do. I also kept “trying to play it right” even though I absolutely did not want to do that. But I also did. It’s weird and queer and messy. I’ll try to explain.
The best thing any human being can do is be the healthiest and most honest version of themselves. But so many of us make little changes to our behavior so we fit in better, feel more safe, and plenty of other reasons. This is called ‘masking.’ Cis gendered people can do it too. You might even do it around a friend you want to impress. It can kind of hurt though, especially if you do a LOT of it for a long time. I pretended to be a boy for 30 years and that’s a whole thing. I’ve written about it. It was hard. So now I don’t really like to mask at all, even a little bit, and for Vampire Survivors that broke the part of me that’s always tried to play games the right way. Once I stopped pretending to care about all the moving numbers, which specific strategies to use, how to kill X number of enemies in X number of seconds, and all the other things that quite frankly bore me, Vampire Survivors became one of the most incredible games I have ever played.
It’s exciting. It’s fun. I love moving around and watching every enemy around me fall, and scooping up experience points, all while becoming more powerful before taking on bosses. And I love all of those things about Vampire Survivors now too, now that I’m able to just live, breathe, exist, and be in control of my own life. Vampire Survivors helped me realize that I don’t always need to be attacking and ready to launch headfirst toward enemies, in life and in games.
Sometimes I can just focus on the scenery and myself, or my character, and grow stronger, all without ever looking back until I turn around to scoop up experience points.
Written by Juno Stump