Vampire Survivors: A Study of an Indie Phenomenon
Exploring and understanding the indie game that everyone’s talking about
Every so often, a tiny video game absolutely explodes and everyone has a theory to explain why. If you’re lucky, you might be privileged to see this growth happen in real-time. That kind of thing is a minor thrill for someone who writes about independently produced games.
So let’s talk about Vampire Survivors. Yes, that’s the actual name.
Vampire Survivors is a pretty low-key game, not all that different than a lot of what I’ve featured in other articles. I’d call it a twin-stick shooter, except the player can’t actually aim so it’s more of a single-stick shooter. You walk slowly around an arena, killing enemies to gain experience so that you can get random power-ups that allow you to fight slightly larger, stronger groups of enemies. The presentation is rough, the game looks and plays like something from an old Flash portal, and poncle, the developer, has minimal web presence.
And yet, as of this writing, Vampire Survivors has over 49,000 reviews on Steam, the vast majority of them positive…
