Is Vampire Crawlers too easy for its own good?

Vampire Crawlers struggles with how to capture this feeling of suddenly rolling downhill toward omnipotence, and what to do with it once players have managed to achieve it. The fact is, there are fairly easy ways to rip the new game in half, mostly revolving around its combo system, which makes cards more powerful the more of them you can play in sequence. Normally, this multiplicative mayhem is balanced by the fact that the combo order is one-way, and based on playing cost for individual cards (meaning you have to keep playing more expensive cards to keep the train rolling). But, gleeful power fantasy that it is, the game wastes little time in giving you cards that reset the order back to zero without losing the combo, meaning you’re now playing very cheap cards that do quadruple or quintuple what they were originally doing. Since this doesn’t just apply to damage output, but things like drawing cards or gaining more mana (to play more cards), it becomes shockingly easy, after just a few hours with the system, to figure out how to regularly build decks that play every single card you own, every single turn, multiple times. The result is a pretty decent translation of the feeling that sets in the first time you really get something powerful going in Vampire Survivors: A giddy sense of power that soon shades into a sort of bloated boredom, as you stand in the eye of a storm of interesting things, protected from actually doing anything by your own unbalanced might

Vampire Crawlers makes a handful of (somewhat listless) efforts to correct for this omnipotent ennui. Cards played multiple times in a single round will start to shatter and break, eventually summoning a super boss to punish you for your cardboard-abusing hubris. And even regular bosses eventually adopt tactics to punish over-playing cards, attacking not when you end a turn, but after every few plays. But all that this means in practice is that you have to resist the urge to do truly broken stuff (like deliberately recurring card-draw cards) just for the sake of it, and include a little armor in your deck to fend off those mid-turn attacks. (The armor cards are, of course, also affected by the combo mechanic, meaning that if you play one deep enough into a run, even a single card can generate more protection than most of the game’s bosses could ever hope to chew through.) The only challenge, then, becomes whether you can get your deck into this unstoppable rolling state before the game’s various Castlevania knock-offs chip you to death.

Discourse on difficulty crops up eternally in gaming for a few different reasons—not least of which because it’s a critical concern that’s exclusive to the only artform where the consumer is an active participant. (Nobody watching Hamlet gets to decide if Horatio spends the first twenty minutes of the play trying to climb the stairs up to Elsinore’s ramparts, wrestling with the stage’s collision physics.) That difficulty isn’t just incidental, either. Learning to surmount the challenges a game lays out is core to the emotional arc of any but the most stridently narrative of games: As your character explores the game’s world, you, the player, are learning to navigate its systems. If you finish your journey to mastery well ahead of the character’s, then you’re left with precious little to do besides be a button-mashing bystander. At the same time, being “too easy” neuters the power of choices that are the whole reason for all this vaunted interactivity. When there’s an obvious right answer to every choice a game presents you—when it becomes as solved as tic-tac-toe—then the decision-making fundamental to the artform is rendered vestigial at best. It’s why game balance is so vital to the artform, and so difficult to master. (This is something I also recently struggled with with Saros, which essentially shrugs and asks the player how much damage they want the games’ enemies to both do and take.) You have to hold back, not because making the player too powerful isn’t fun—it is, in short bursts, as anyone who’s ever screwed around with console commands or cheat codes well knows—but because it eventually burns out what your game can meaningfully accomplish.

Part of the novelty, and the excitement, of Vampire Survivors, was the way it flipped an artillery-dropping bird at any of these ideas of restraint. With treasure chests that exploded into increasingly absurd blasts of fireworks and enemies in the thousands, it asked players to shut their brains off and embrace the power fantasy. The game’s later boss fights occasionally required actual skill—usually in avoiding enemy projectiles, which could get extremely hard to even see when your character was filling the screen with various axes, exploding wagon wheels, and particle effects—but it mostly just accepted that players were there to eventually roll through everything. Vampire Crawlers, with its turn-based presentation, flirts with the idea of being deeper. But this is, like so many claims of vampires in other castles, just another misdirect. Just like its predecessor, the game is pure candy; all the addition of its more “thoughtful” layers does is make the sugar a little harder to chew.