Hello gamers, my name is Scott and I can’t stop buying playing roguelike bullet hell games.
I guess many people know this particular genre as “Survivors” games, thanks in large part to Vampire Survivors popularizing it a few years back, but they combine action roguelike and bullet hell (shoot ’em up/shmup) gameplay into one to create for something that I have a hard time saying no to.
Basically, these are just games where you play as a character, pick up power-ups, weapons, and modifiers, and try to survive increasingly difficult waves of enemies. Sometimes, there are objectives to complete, but a lot of the times, you only need to move around and select which abilities you want as you level up, and the game does the rest for you.
This is the main draw to these games, for me. The older I get, the more I want to kind of shut my brain off and do as little as possible. These action-roguelike-bullet-hells let me do that, as most of them auto-attack enemies for you, allowing me to truly relax and play with one hand on a controller.
It’s very satisfying watching your powers grow as the enemy density increases, allowing you to slice through large swaths of zombies, or skeletons, or bats, or whatever the game has. Sitting back and witnessing them disappear as your XP bar flies towards another level… mmm, yeah, that’s the good stuff.
Many in the genre differ from one another in varying ways, like Death Must Die where you equip armor and weapons before heading into battle, but they all scratch a very particular itch for me that I cannot deny.
Another reason why these games catch on so easily with me is that many of them are not super graphics-intensive and so they can easily be played on the Steam Deck. I distinctly remember, when recovering from kidney transplant surgery two years ago, I was confined to a recliner while my wounds healed and I played the heck out of Yet Another Zombie Survivors for hours on end since I basically couldn’t do much else.
Being able to play a lot of these Steam games in bed on my Deck is, again, another huge plus. After sitting at a desk all day for work (and sometimes play, which is also work), the last thing I want to do is sit at my desk for more game time.
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, Death Must Die, The Spell Brigade, Halls of Torment, NIMRODS, Asgard’s Fall: Origins, Nordic Ashes, God of Weapons, Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel, and Soulstone Survivors are just some of the games in this genre that I own, and I can recommend them all, if this genre is your sort of thing.
It also helps that they’re all relatively cheap, anywhere from $5 to $20 and rarely higher, so when I see a new one pop up on the Steam store, I inevitably say “sure, why not?” and pick it up. I suspect I’m not the only one like this, either, so let me know in the comments below if you’re a habitual Survivors gamer like me.
Also, while we’re at it, can we get a dedicated category for this genre on Steam? Because when I click “action roguelike” I don’t always get the particular type of game I’m looking for, and the same for when I click “bullet hell.” The two genres combine into one to make a special lovechild that I think everyone should give a try if they haven’t already. They’re simple, addictive, cheap, and best of all, fun.
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The post I’m in (bullet) hell, but I’m loving every minute of it. Here’s why Survivors games have a chokehold on me appeared first on Destructoid.
