So every year, my birthday comes up during the holiday Steam sales, meaning anyone who knows me waits for that to arrive and then springs some things on me. This year most of my sale purchases were DLC for games I'd owned for a bit, with small exceptions. I decided "Well, I'll buy some of the more notable Vampire Survivor-alikes as I dive into this genre".
I've spent a lot of time with VS recently, it's good, it very much hits me like an idle game, opening new systems regularly but keeping the actual play loop very simple, while you make the connections on what moves you forward, how to progress, and also, it starts implementing systems that just let you cheese forward or grind it out if you wanna just steamroll. Good stuff. I've hit a plateau in the game and as a result I decided I was going to dig into some of the other titles in the genre and see how they hit me.
And then later in the sale someone saw that purchase trend, and gifted me "Beautiful Mystic Survivors".
I thought it was going to be an overt h-game, but no, apparently the team behind the game made this "budget" version of it ($4.99 instead of $9.99!) and stripped out the sexual content. If you're horny, you want Sexy Mystic Survivors, which... finishes each round with a sex minigame, or some kind of lewd gif? I can't tell from the store page how it's going to differ other than a shot of some absolutely wild jiggle physics on a sex scene. Careful looking that one up.
Immediately BMS puts me on edge with this opening cutscene which, it turns out, crashes if minimized, which is a thing I've just learned taking screenshots for this post. The game itself is better than this, but it has... problems. See, love it or hate it, Vampire Survivors is a game that winnows down as much friction as it can to the point where your goals become a) dodge and b) choose gear. Those are it. You do nothing else. They add wrinkles to both of these in time, but that's all you do in VS.
BMS is a game that starts with me discovering your basic starting weapon is a handicap to be overcome, because once I reach my first "level up, choose some gear" decision...
...I found out the game is very, very RNG-heavy. Now, the very fact that your initial pickup of an item has a randomly generated rarity seems "ill-conceived". I might be hampering my entire run if I pick the item I actually want but it's shown up as Normal, not Epic or Legendary. Turns out that higher rarity items get a multiplier to stats per level, as well as sometimes just having a full extra level, for passive items. Then I realized that your starter weapon is always Normal. So now I have a permanent weak spot in my arsenal, and this is when I discover just how much meta-progression is going to build this game.
Both games make you work for some "basic" boosts early on, but BMS has these little papercuts that make it so much less fun to play. For one thing, VS locks difficulty options, making sure your on-boarding is identical for all players: until you clear certain hurdles, you can't turn on hard mode on stages. These hurdles are "beating the particular stage once on not-hard". BMS decides there are 4 options, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, and a fifth "LOCKED" I've not seen. Normal is baseline, Easy is buffing the player, Hard/Very Hard are "enemies are buffed, and appear more, and no XP boost", so you're basically going to suffer a slow attrition over time. People have tried to work out if it's possible to clear the game on Hard from zero, without grinding stats, and apparently the answer as of a recent patch is "no". (A lot of very odd balance changes have happened to this game. At one point earning the map functionality, which allows for a lot of unlocks and build control, was tied to "make 2000 bucks". Now it's hidden deeper.)
My first run made it quite a while without any issue, although it did take me a while to realize that I was supposed to be aiming some of my weapons with the second stick/mouse. (Later I discovered that I also had some button-bound special attacks. Nothing in the game explained this. I got one very incorrect tooltip a few times though.) It came to a complete halt when this boss spawned offscreen (I knew because his lifebar appeared!), he did a dash move, and the crowd of enemies force-shoved him forward so fast he came to rest on top of me, trapping and killing me instantly in his burning trail.
By the end of my second run, my computer was screaming. 3D does not improve this genre in a lot of ways, both in that the trees in the foreground can very often block items and enemies both, and in that it means this game can absolutely stress video hardware when it pushes to "endgame" with hundreds of polygonal men shoving in, with 3D "XP orbs" under them, and maybe gold, or the stage items, or... it adds up fast. Vampire Survivors can remain a little unoptimized as a treat, and it's all 2D sprites with a little bit of visual flair atop it. This game (which, in case you think I'm unfairly picking on it, declares it is both in early access BUT ALSO is past version 1.0 by a few builds now!) definitely kicks like a mule without someone making sure you "don't zoom out the camera to fit even more enemies on screen as things pile up" or "have corpses unload". Seriously, one class of enemy actually dies and leaves corpses you have to kill or they prevent your movement, just as an extra kick in the teeth.
It's kind of amazing how much this has really made me look at VS in admiration. It took very minimalist design and popularized a new genre, and every change this game makes to that formula really highlights the design chops the VS team brought with each change and experiment. Even if I weren't comparing BMS to a genre-definer, though, it's still a bad twin-stick shooter with extra grind added on. I had to go searching through guides and forums to try and figure out basic mechanics the game didn't explain, and the things I learned in the process are incredibly clownshoes:
- Briefly, Beautiful Mystic Survivors was Sexy Mystic Survivors before some international publisher fuckery (question mark? lot of claims both ways about this!) ended with the team getting the 18+ DLC killed and the contents of the title moved to a second publisher/dev shell company, which you had to rebuy. Fans did not like this, especially since BMS saves are not compatible with SMS!
- There is a toggle in the options menu which enables "one-hand mode". Nobody seems to know what this does. It doesn't condense the controls any. (Yes, yes, insert obvious joke here.)
- The Relic system seems to be one of the most controversial aspects of the game right now in that now it's both harder to get them (they used to be a guarantee on midbosses) and multiple of them are just run-killers if you don't have the reroll skill purchased yet (very few do not come with a double-edged tradeoff. You can't skip them. Imagine if you just have to begin taking 100% more damage to do 15% more. This is a real relic).
- I didn't know where else to put this: legit every basic weapon in this game is an "homage" to VS mechanics. The Sun Stone is the Lightning Ring, Scythe is Santa Water, Bow is Knife, etc. etc. The later evolutions change things up but the base stuff is blatant.
I was hoping that like Midnight Castle Succubus (and, for the record, that had a very good, more impressive sequel called Castle in the Clouds worth looking up and DEFINITELY only playing in SFW mode!) this was going to turn out to be a horny game with an interesting mechanical underbelly, but no. No, it's a bad game that plays bad with questionable dev decisions all around, and all it did was teach me a lot about what I enjoy design-wise in this genre and what specific moves VS made in places that were ignored. On to the next 4 of these I guess.
(I wish it were only 4, I've been shown about a dozen now. Most recommended in some form.)