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I have so many annoyed thoughts about this game it is maddening.

This is GREAT! I've been thinking a lot about how the spirit of gambling haunts all of culture now. Even the AI crap is gambling. I'm pretty certain the reason folks find vibe coding so addicting is that it only works some of the time. Spin the wheel, finish the job in 5 min or debug for an hour.

To me Vampire Survivors is a bit less ick than all the clones, there's something genuinely charming about the ripped-sprite-ish aesthetic and Italian names. The streamlining of controls/play to be purely "what can be done only with movement/position" is IMO pretty interesting!

Very interesting read - is this a problem you find with all roguelikes/roguelites? I feel like Hades is an obvious example of a game that addresses a lot of the issues you describe but it is a bit of an exception to the rule

great article, and it's nice to see the consensus slowly but surely change for games which any waste your time without meaningful play. though I think it misses the strong influence of mobile games retention-based design in vampire survivors, since that game is basically archero without the IAP.

I used to think that VS was a trojan horse that laundered mobile dark pattern bullshit into the premium PC and console market, but considering how mobile (and also roblox and AAA gacha) have been the main gateway into gaming for around a decade, it is kind of inevitable that shift would happen

Thanks! I guess I could have been clearer that mobile/gatcha is the parallel evolution I was talking about, but the techniques are such in lockstep with modern gambling design that honestly I felt like I would just be getting into the weeds. Really just want designers to interrogate their decisons