Two video games: Vampire Survivors and Pentiment

I've been playing a couple of excellent video games that are as different from one another as can be imagined, and also different from anything you or I are likely to have played lately:

Vampire Survivors is a five-dollar Italian indie game that apparently took the gaming world by storm when it popped up out of nowhere in the spring of 2022. It has a cheesy-looking retro-pixel-art style like a lot of these games, and at first appears to be the dumbest game in the world: a ONE-stick shooter where you don't even control the shooting, sort of like if Robotron: 2084 decided to be a roguelike. You control any of a few characters with different weapons that just fire automatically at a limited rate, with different characteristics, and you run around an endless open plain and get swarmed by various monsters until you die. (As the creators themselves like to note, there are no vampires and, ultimately, no surviving. Supposedly the monsters are minions of an unseen Dracula somewhere--the only place where he appears is the title screen.) If you somehow manage to survive for 30 minutes, you get attacked by Death personified who kills you anyway--that's a "win".

But this game is frighteningly addictive, as it starts to reveal hidden depths of strategy that just unfold and unfold, somewhat in the manner of a roguelike or a clicker game. The monsters drop gems that give you XP when you collect them, and when you level up, you get a choice of new weapons that fire simultaneously with the ones you've got, or accessories that power them up in different ways. Or you can choose to level up some item you've already got.

The weapons have odd names like "King Bible", "Garlic" and "Santa Water". Some weapons fire in a directed way, others randomly, and still others do area damage or orbit you like a buzzsaw of destruction. Accessories give you extra health or damage, shield you in various ways, affect your luck or movement. Eventually, the items start to combine to become different, evolved weapons, with a complex progression tree. The game has a retro-arcade look but there actually isn't a lot of twitch skill involved; it is largely about learning the lore of the weapons and accessories, mastering the emergent properties of how they interact, and knowing which monsters are weak enough for you to take at any given moment. As some YouTubers have demonstrated, by making exactly the right strategic decisions, there are levels you can beat without even moving.

You also get "gold", mostly gotten from chests dropped by boss monsters, that you can spend on various permanent power-ups and unlocking new characters. Eventually, you unlock new levels to play on, which have more complicated shapes, and more ways of leveling up your character, customizing the game or even making it harder, which can have strategic advantages of its own. Just when you think the game is exhausting its interest, some entirely new way of progressing will unfold, and the author seems to have timed these just right to keep you hooked. The feeling of leveling up to the point where you just become the center of a death zone, chewing through crowds of monsters as they swarm you, is a thing that keeps you coming back.

There are, blessedly, NO in-game transactions or other tricks designed to monetize your addiction. You pay your five bucks and that's it. The one exception is in the mobile version, which is free: you can revive your character once when you die by watching an ad. (There are other ways in-game to earn revives, but they unlock later in the progression.) On the scale of mobile-game evil this is remarkably low, since you can just forego the extra revives and there are no ads at all, but I wouldn't recommend the mobile version anyway unless you have a large tablet, because it's exactly the same game otherwise and the tiny sprites and icons are hard to read unless your screen is pretty big.

Pentiment is a game I got for Christmas that was described as being a game seemingly written for me. It's a point-and-click mystery adventure set at an abbey in Germany in the early 16th century.

It's a time of change; old systems are under threat. Martin Luther just nailed 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg. Movable type and professional art are making the medieval scriptoria obsolete. Your character, Andreas, is a young journeyman artist who is working as a guest at the monastery, learning from the monks and producing his masterpiece in the scriptorium--but all is not as it seems at the abbey; the arrival of a wealthy and educated baron, who has commissioned an elaborate Book of Hours from the monks, pulls Andreas into a tale of conspiracy, murder, forbidden books and occult doings. One that I have, as yet, only uncovered a little bit.

Pentiment has the spirit of an old Infocom text adventure game crossed with an Umberto Eco novel, illustrated in the gorgeous style of an illuminated manuscript. Characters speak in cartoon talk balloons, with their speech written out by an industrious, unseen scribe (you can speed him up by clicking)--sometimes the writer makes spelling mistakes and scratches them out to correct them; references to God are left blank and filled in at the end after switching to red ink. The exception is characters who work in the printing trade, whose utterances are slammed into the talk balloon with movable type. Some items and characters have footnotes that you can read by zooming out to the manuscript page, items helpfully called out by a drawing of a hand with an absurdly long pointing finger. Sometimes characters discussing books in the abbey's collection will wander metaphorically into the book's illustrations, addressing each other across a divide of text. Sometimes we see Andreas's internal monologue as he mulls over a decision--instead of an angel and devil on his shoulders, he has Socrates, Dante's Beatrice and a combative fool, recommending different courses of action.

Choices you make in the game seem to determine what kind of person Andreas is. He can be a louche rapscallion, a bookworm interested in science or the occult, combative or tactful. I don't know if they affect the outcome of the story much.

The game is not for everyone. People who want a game to be about winning seem to be irritated by it. I've seen some reviews complaining that the game is slow-paced and talky and has no real action at all, which is true. It's more of a novel in video-game form. I think there should be things like this. If you want a game with this type of setting but with a lot of action, the Assassin's Creed series is right over there.

I haven't played nearly as far into it as Vampire Survivors, and it takes a little while to hook you, but at this point it has hooked me, and I'm interested to see where this is going.




Come to think of it, Vampire Survivors and Pentiment aren't COMPLETELY different: they both have nuns, monks and priests in them! And, uh, that's about it.