Yin and Yang.

Inside: Nomad Survival, Boneraiser Minions, 20 Minutes Till Dawn, Blazing Beaks

Nomad Survival
(The Fox Knocks, 2022)

Vampire Survivors was a very fun game, and all of the copycats it’s spawned really don’t have to do all that much to also be fun if they just copy the right parts of the formula. Nomad Survival is pretty emblematic of this mediocre copycat-VS game, because it’s basically a boring, pared-down version of VS, and the parts of it where it strays from the formula are the worst parts.

I came through this game wondering if it had been playtested. The choice to have some of the hero attacks force you to stop moving or suddenly speed you up was absolutely miserable; you were basically locked into using the “move while attacking” boon for the Divine because trying to play with her otherwise was just such an awful experience, but I hated the quickguy (or whatever it was called) even more — trying to outmaneuver a mob only to suddenly careen sideways was just so frustrating. Then on the other side, the Paladin’s attack was so OP that I saw people giving advice that was just “literally use paladin and stand in one place” to beat hard modes; there was no reason to ever use a different hero. The attacks had the same problem; the fire wand was the worst — it routinely did 30% more damage over the course of the run compared to other weapons, even when all fully upgraded, while stuff like the ghost sword was useless in comparison. The raccoon pet was broken, too, especially on the last level, where it would bring the AOE towers to you to focus down, meaning you could camp in a nook and literally put the game down and do other things while the paladin autowon the level. It was a crazy easy game.

But it cribs juuuust enough from VS that the basic gameplay loops is still satisfying in a mindless way — I ended up 100%ing it just going robotically through runs when I was too tired to do anything that required using my brain. I don’t regret playing it through, but it also wasn’t, like, good. It was boring and deeply uninteresting.

I think the only reason I’d rec this would be if you’ve already blown through VS and the better games in the genre but still wanted that gameplay in a new package.

Boneraiser Minions
(caiys, 2023)

The game was honestly kind of a hot mess. I’m really not sure why its reviews are so good. Response bias, I guess.

It’s a shame, because the idea here — instead of getting weapons, you raise undead minions to fight for you — feels like it should be really good, but…

First, while the aesthetic here is actually one I quite like, it’s really, really bad for a game in this genre, where things need to be instantly parseable because you need to react quickly. On some level the dev knows this, since part of the introduction to your base area involves bringing you over to the place where you can adjust the colors so you can actually see wtf is going on. The point at which you’re having to tell players to make graphical changes because the UI is so incomprehensible is the point at which you need to step back and make some different aesthetic choices. And honestly the menu wasn’t even robust enough for me; I constantly was losing my character in the maps, even after putting them in a neon yellow costume to help them stand out.

I think sometimes, when people copy ideas from games they like instead of building their own thing from the ground up, they don’t stop to consider that the reason something was being done a certain way wasn’t because no one thought of another option, but because it worked really well the way it was. VS has a weird, ugly, delightfully kitschy windows 98 look, but part of the reason it has that look is because it makes everything on the map immediately comprehensible. Even though VS’s maps were bigger, with more enemies and more going on, I never once had a problem keeping track of everything, because it was intentionally designed to be easy to read. You can of course have a game that’s both very pretty and comprehensible (though tbh I’d argue that VS’s look is an intentional aesthetic consistent with the rest of the game’s tone), but just “improving” the look doesn’t instantly map to an improvement to the game. That’s a real fallacy.

The other big problem was the game has no tutorial, no tooltips, and lots of jargon. Almost everything has to be figured out by trial-and-error, including extremely basic things like why there’s two HP bars and how they work. And some of it I honestly still don’t understand. Like, what the fuck is a “bro”? Why are they called that? What does that even mean? I’m still not sure which enemies were “blessed” or how you could tell. The game tells you absolutely nothing and it’s not clever, it’s annoying.

Luckily this doesn’t matter too much because the game is incredibly easy. I never had any idea of what the functional difference in minion types were, what the relative power levels were, or like, what the difference between a “guard” melee attacked and a “slash” melee attacker was, but it was ultimately irrelevant. Within a few runs I had maxed out my character class, meta progression, and added all the additional enemy types, and it didn’t matter at all. The other character classes — and my god, there are WAY too many — theoretically have different strengths and weaknesses, but the game is so easy there’s no need to pay attention to them; you can do whatever for any of them.

The point that I gave up on the game was when I attempted the achievement for only selecting the first option from all the minion, buff, and spell options for the entire run and… it didn’t matter. The run wasn’t any more difficult than the runs I was doing on my own. I still blew through it. Even if you make all your choices completely randomly, it doesn’t matter. That’s bonkers. It makes me think, actually, of Dogpile, and just how challenging the “random” challenge in that game was, and how satisfying it was to finally win.

One of the issues it turns out is inherent in this premise — and I’m not quite sure how to fix this — is that when you’re not the one attacking, you don’t actually have to do anything. I spent most of my runs standing in one spot waiting for my minions to go kill everything; intermittently, I’d run to open a chest that had spawned. That was it. Once I realized even my strategy choices didn’t matter I felt completely useless. It would have worked better as an idler, come to think of it.

The game tries to compensate for this lack of complexity with a surfeit of systems, and it’s pure quantity over quality. Did it need a bespoke card game? Did it need a dungeon crawl mode, an online mode, an endless mode, *and* a story mode? Did it need 50 classes with minor differences that don’t even matter because you can just do the same thing every time? There are so many items that even with bans it’s pretty hard to purposely build out anything on a run. You’re always at the mercy of the RNG; there was no “okay, this time let me try this…”, only “well, I guess I’m doing this for this run.” (Which didn’t even matter anyway as it turned out.) There was a huge “kill your darlings” problem here, CONTENT for the sake of adding more content.

I guess I have to talk about the writing, ugh.

I don’t even know what to call it… they’re not really jokes, because that implies some cleverness or even attempt at cleverness, or at least some kind of setup/punchline. The game is just… obsessed with dicks. Like, the first achievement is called “Thy First Boner,” the interaction text for opening a relic chest is “fondle junk”, one of the notifications for a chest spawn is “I want to shove my face into that big chesty”… it’s not even like, aimed at the worst cishet dudes, it literally feels like the target audience is children, I can’t imagine anyone other than a 10-year-old boy finding this entertaining, and even then the “joke” is “teehee, SEX.” It’s not even clever enough to be a ‘that’s what she said’ joke; often the text twists itself in loops just for an excuse to talk about boners and dick. The overall vibe was being stuck next to That Guy at a party and desperately wanting to get away. It doesn’t even rise to the level of crude humor, it was just weird and offputting, and frankly I deal with enough jackasses hopped up on how great they think their dicks are in real life; I’m not looking for it in my recreation time.

I played this game for 10 hours, mostly powered by a desire for it to be better. The premise is just so much more original and interesting than most other survivorlikes. But then I did the “random” challenge and the wind was just out of my sails. It just feels like it *should* be better — there’s a kernel of a great game in here. But I can’t think of any scenario under which I’d recommend it.

20 Minutes Till Dawn
(flanne, 2023)

This is yet another game that took VS and made it boring. I don’t have a ton to say about it; it just wasn’t fun.

Once again, we see the choice to go with An Aesthetic (TM) without considering the effect it will have on gameplay. The entire game, enemies and environment are in various shades of dark green; it’s basically a green-tinted greyscale. As should have been immensely obvious, this makes quickly parsing the environment a huge pain in the ass. I actually had an unusually hard time with hitboxes in this game; I’m not sure if this is a function of the flat color palette alone or if there was also some wonkiness with the hitboxes, but I haven’t had this issue is any other VS knockoff, so something was up.

Oh, also, the game makes the baffling choice to have colliding with trees damage you, which was infuriating, especially when I didn’t have any idea that was going to happen and you only get 4 HP. Having a run ruined because I accidentally hit a damn tree was just horrible.

The other unnecessary change it made was of the “why limit weapons?” variety, a mistake Nomad Survival also made (though NS at least compensated for it by giving you tons of rerolls). I had an incredibly hard time telling which upgrades were for which item, and each upgrade tree only has two nodes, so you’re just churning through small weapon upgrades in a way that felt really pointless. It felt more like grabbing random stuff than an intentional build, and the similarity of so many of them was also odd (this is a summon that shoots things; this is a different summon that shoots things). To quote myself, I think sometimes, when people copy ideas from games they like instead of building their own thing from the ground up, they don’t stop to consider that the reason something was being done a certain way wasn’t because no one thought of another option, but because it worked really well the way it was. The reason for the weapon limits in VS wasn’t because they weren’t thinking big enough; it was because that makes for a better, more focused player experience, one in which the player feels in control of their run.

Also a couple of the designs were weirdly tits-first, it was like grimdark lovecraft greyscale and then the art took to time to let us know the women were in push-up bras. Thanks, I guess? I also find it squicky when you have a cast that’s all white women, but also one or two Asian ones. It makes the Asian characters feel very fetishy to me, like, “We know y’all like *this* kind of nonwhite lady, winkwink nudgenudge.”

Anyway I did three or four runs of this, found it deeply unfun, and then saw that each of the dozen characters has FIFTEEN difficulty levels you were supposed to work through, and just, lol no.

Blazing Beaks
(Applava, 2019)

This is a roguelike dungeon crawler twin-stick, of the “room-based” variety.

This game was really hurt by a lack of metaprogression. The gameplay was fine, and I thought the idea of having to deal with debuffs to haul prize items back was pretty neat, but none of it builds toward anything — I was disappointed to find that there was no way to keep track of relics, like, I would have loved if every time you got a relic back to the shop you could check it off a list and, say, if you cleared the final boss with all the relics found you got a ‘good end’ or something. As it was, it had a real “why am I doing this” problem, which is a shame because I do think the bones here were good (though I would have liked to see the player have a little more control over their weapons; weapons being both scarce and random meant runs were often make-or-break on RNG).

I think this game was probably designed with multiplayer in mind, and would be a fun party game. Unfortunately I always play these solo (Mr Act is a very relaxed and sensitive gamer, and I am what one might call “a competitive asshole”), and sometimes get a worse experience as a result — I know it seriously limits their market, but I do wish more co-op games would be honest about being designed co-op first; just because a game technically can be played solo doesn’t mean the solo experience is a good or even representative one. I suspect if I’d first encountered this game in a party scenario I would have had a much more positive opinion of it.