So I don’t really care about being way late to the party for games but it does feel wrong to play this one-trick meme game so long after it first became popular. It’s an ultra-cheap game that blew up in popularity and spawned countless clones. It’s easy to understand why too: it makes you feel ridiculously powerful as you wade through screenfuls of enemies dolling out death yet it’s such a simple game to play that it takes no real effort. Some people have racked up hundreds of hours on this to unlock everything, which is just insane. For me, about a dozen hours was enough to experience all that the game has to offer. It feels addictive, sure, but it’s still a very shallow game.

The title and graphics suggest a theme centered around killing vampires and other monsters. The characters you can choose appear to be monster hunters of many types but none of this matters. You’re not playing this for the story. This game resembles the old-school top-down bullet hell games but it’s actually kind of the inverse. As another player wittily puts it, in this game you are the bullet hell. Every character starts with a single weapon but you can pick up more. The weapons can be upgraded and further evolved. All of this means that while you feel weak at the very beginning, you’ll eventually be spewing projectiles and attacks all over the screen. A normal game only lasts 30 minutes, at which a super powerful Death character spawns to kill you. There’s an Endless mode and advanced players can collect special weapons to delay dying or even kill Death, but that’s for after you’ve unlocked more stuff to play around with. Lasting the full 30 minutes might seem daunting on your very first run, but really anyone can do it after a few runs.

This cuts to the heart of why the game is so popular. It makes you feel powerful and it looks like a busy game with so much going on. But it’s dead easy to play. There are no controls other than movement as the weapons are all auto-attack. Almost all enemies can only damage you if they hit you and even any projectiles that they shoot can be destroyed by your own weapons. All you need to do is not be a dumbass and walk into enemies. There’s some strategy in that you get to pick a weapon or support item every time you gain a level. The weapons are definitely not equal and you need some knowledge of what works best and how they combine. You need some luck too since it’s always possible to be offered crap that you don’t want. Then again as you play and accumulate gold, you can spend it on upgrades that carry across all characters. This alone makes you amazingly powerful and you even get tools to mitigate luck issues, by rerolling the offered choices or even banishing a choice that you never want.

Simple as this setup is, it can be addictive to unlock and try out all of the different character and weapon combinations. A bit later on, you can unlock arcanas which provide a different type of passive bonus and each of the hidden characters come with special weapons of their own. It is indeed exhilarating to be able to wade through screenfuls of enemies feeling completely invulnerable as over the top weapon effects of all kinds bounce all over the place. The weapons are very much not equal in that some are clearly much better than others and many of the defensive options are pointless since you really just want to kill everything as quickly as possible. Different combinations work sufficiently differently that it’s fun to keep trying stuff. Sometimes you want to fill the screen with projectiles, other times you want to fill it with death zones that will kill anything that walk into it. Most of all, the game takes so little work for the payoff it delivers that it makes you come back again and again for more even if at heart it’s a really simple game.

It’s still insane to me that some players have put so many hours into it just to make the damage numbers go up by some miniscule amount. Even in the hardest area and with the handicapping curse levels cranked up, the game is no match for a moderately powered up player without the need to do any crazy grinding. For my part, it makes for a nice if short-lived diversion that also sort of serves as revenge for dying to all those old games way back when. Kudos the developers for making bank from this one clever idea.