You can only experience Vampire Survivors for the first time, once, and get that giddy feeling of not knowing what’s coming, and oh my gosh aren’t there a lot of enemies, and what does this do, and how do I evolve that. Everything is undiscovered and it’s the discovery that’s a delight.
With repeated play comes the knowledge you’ll need to beat it, but also a sense of to beat it, and with that comes frustration when you don’t – when you don’t do as well as the turn before, or build as optimally as you could. And it begins to irk you how long attempts actually take, with all the stopping – much closer to 45 minutes than the 30-minute time-limit levels apparently have. What began as a quick game becomes a slog.
And after a while, though the compulsion is still strong, you find the fun has started to leak out.
But developer poncle has found a solution and it’s delightfully simple: mini-expansions. A way to introduce you to characters and powers and maps, that you don’t know, all over again. And the latest of these, Tides of the Foscari, has rejuvenated Vampire Survivors for me.
Like Legacy of the Moonspell before it, Tides of the Foscari adds a bunch of new characters, a bunch of new weapons and evolutions, plenty of new music you’ll be listening to a lot, and a big new map. And what I particularly like about it is how you can feel the evolution of poncle’s thought behind it.