2024-09-06: On Garlic-Flavored Roguelite ARPGs
I have a bit of a fixation on games like Vampire Survivor. I never fully gelled on what those are as a genre. I've heard the simplistic "VS clone", I've heard the tongue in cheek "Garlic-like", and the more scholarly "Survival roguelite", but you know the vibe. You run around beating up an infinite swarm of foes, gaining meta-progression currency to buy better starting state to be able to beat up even more foes next time. It's a good 20 minute brain-off thing for me; except I typically do about 10 runs in a row then it's time to go to bed, ugh!
There's like a thousand games like this out now, and yeah a lot of them are kind of just low effort clones to try to cash in on the trend. There's a couple I came to really enjoy though; enough that I'd put VS itself at a strong 3 out of 5. Some of them are a completely different take on the formula and some are pretty much just copy cats with a little more polish in places I wanted polish.
Rogue Genesia
Rogue Genesia tried to create a more roguelite "run with goals and progression" approach than VS itself. It somewhat lifted the map and stage system from Slay the Spire, presenting a tree of nodes you traverse and get a short snippet of gameplay in each. Each node can have different objectives like a specific kill count, defeating a boss, or simple survival.
Leveling up provides you with cards. Individual cards can be weapons, but they can also be anything from a massive array of smaller upgrades. Think things like "+10% damage" rather than the big bombastic passives of VS. But you get hundreds of them in a run. In fact, if you do a full run with some of the "+Experience" meta-progression in place, you'll likely exhaust the deck and do the final couple of stages with literally everything either acquired or banished. This does create a feel of runs ending in the same way, but you have a limited number of weapon slots and your weapon choices dictate what you do or don't want to keep or banish, so there's variety.
The meta-progression point system is purely spending points to make stats bigger. Getting new weapons and cards comes from achievements, which is kind of a drag in some places because some of these achievements are quite difficult. I still don't have everything unlocked and I have about 150 hours in the game; mostly because every major patch dumps a ton of new content I go and grab. As much of it as I can anyway.
It's probably the clone I've played the most of.
Its biggest Achilles heel is performance, at least on my box. In a normal run I can get so many weapons, so many extra projectiles, and such a high fire rate that if I'm not carefully picking low-overhead weapons, I can chug down to 5 FPS and my PC explode. I have a pretty old system, I admit, but this is easily the worst of the genre games I play for performance.
I also just really like the music in this. Despite all that playtime it hasn't gotten old for me.
Artifact Seeker
Artifact Seeker is a lot like Rogue Genesia: you have the Slay the Spire style map, and level ups provide you with a massive array of passives to draw from like cards. It differs in a couple major ways though.
First, it's a pretty rough translation from a Chinese developed project. You have the classic translation burrs of words sometimes just not having spaces between them and pretty rigid verbiage. Nothing is completely incomprehensible though, so this is mostly an aesthetic complaint.
Second, there's quite a bit of focus on... I'll just say... shapely female protagonists. They're not trashy, but armored warriors they're not. The art's really good though (though it might be AI generated for all I know...). Your starting character is a generic male masked hero sort of thing, then everything after that short of DLC is some variant of the basic six-pack of fantasy women most developers resort to. It's kind of not great even if I do look at the ranger and think to myself "goals..."
Third, while Artifact Seeker keeps Rogue Genesia and Vampire Survivor's approach to a limited weapon pool, how they promote builds and synergy is quite different. Each time you acquire a new weapon or passive, it levels up one of about two dozen synergy pools. These synergies are basic "elements" of attack like fire, piercing, darkness, etc. As these synergies level up, your weapons grow in scaling power with your stats, allowing more damage. Each weapon has either one or two synergies attached to it; like fire arrow keys off piercing and fire. This gives additional value to some cards you may not typically otherwise draw, because the difference between levels is quite distinct.
Fourth, the focus on tracking completion on everything. There's about twelve characters, each character has access to six starting weapons, and each weapon has your progress in the game tracked individually in the form of highest completely difficulty level. There's 50 difficulty levels that are tokenized by adding individual debuffs to the run. Things like +25% enemy HP is one level and you can mix and match. To even just finish a run with every weapon you'd need almost a hundred runs, let alone trying to push levels with them. You'd be busy awhile there.
Finally there's a big focus on story telling and decision making. You have the same node tree as Rogue Genesia but some of the nodes instead present you with a short story then prompt you to make a decision that'll impact boons your character receives. I find this kind of a let down honestly, I'm not here for choose your own adventure stuff. However this is a source of a lot of the game's unlocks: once you gain an artifact once from one of these, it enters the drop pool.
Artifact Seeker has a sort of dark gritty atmosphere and probably better on the performance side than most of these games, even when you're pitching around a thousand projectiles. I don't know, I find it neat.
Soulstone Survivors
Soulstone's one of the more unique takes on the genre. It presents itself mainly in deed and aesthetic like an MMO or a Diablolike but isn't really anything at all like those. There's a massive variety of class and weapon selections, much like Artifact Seeker, and your selections manipulate what the drop pool is shaped like in a given run. There's also class-specific passives and a passive tree you can navigate to further make each class distinct. Overall, your choice of class matters more here than in the prior two games.
Given Soulstone came a couple years before Artifact Seeker, I think maybe the latter copied quite a bit of homework here. You have the same interface with what looks like a hotbar with cooldown indicators (but everything auto-fires, of course), the same general aesthetic and vibe for leveling up then choosing upgrades drawn from a deck of cards, and the same kind of approach to growing in power via synergies around your weapon selections. In meta you also have the same class and weapon style of build choice and how that manipulates what's available in your drop pool. There's a lot of similarities.
The core method of powering up though differs a little. Rather than having a bunch of synergy traits you increase with your picks, most of Soulstone pivots around buffs and debuffs. A lot of the passives you can pick up grant your attacks stacks of various debuffs like poison, burning, etc. Then a lot of weapons will directly exploit these debuffs for increased damage. The same can be said for buffs too, though less frequently. This does limit how many builds are truly effective, but there's such a variety of weapons that it's not really noticeable. I tended to enjoy picking up 6 elemental "Beam" skills and then stacking armor shredding and letting the multiple hits a second from the beam zero out enemy defenses.
Your method of selecting difficulty here is somewhat like Artifact Seeker too, where you choose various debuffs to raise the difficulty and at certain breakpoints you move up a "Tier" and the enemies and rewards get more significant directly as well. The tier-ups are major mechanical changes though, like one tier-up introducing towers that fire mortar projectiles at you for as long as they survive on the map, and one introducing a reaper that follows you around like an unstoppable instant-kill snail. Tiering up also makes each boss battle add more bosses to the battle at once, until you're fighting eight or nine of them at the end of each stage.
Your stage-to-stage progression isn't as robust as it is in the prior two games. Instead of having a big map and different nodes types, you simply take a portal to the next area and, if you won fast enough, get other portals with different challenge modes attached to them. Still neat though.
Soulstone is probably the most frantic of the games I enjoy. It's endless and by the time you're done with a run you'll be zipping around at the speed of sound dodging AoE field markers that only last for a couple frames before they go off, filling the screen with giant projectiles. It's real satisfying.
Shape Shifter Formations
Shape Shifter Formations is simultaneously the most simple and direct, and the most unique of the VS clones I enjoy. I'd equate it more to Geometry Wars than Vampire Survivor, but there's a healthy mixing of both present here.
This is a sci-fi style shooter where you control an Asteroids-style space ship and fly around in a one-screen arena auto-firing at enemies and picking up experience shards they drop. You get only one weapon, which you pick at the start of your run, and your drop pool is weighted toward one type of passive, which is decided by the ship you pick. Your ship also provides some small stat manipulation and an active ability on a large cooldown. Later on you get the ability to pick a second type of passive that is weighted higher in the drop pool, letting you create more varied builds easily.
With only one weapon, your build variety comes down more to passive effects. These effects can trigger on weapon hit, on fire, on dodge, on enemy kill, on active ability use, or on being hit and can grow powerful enough to provide entire addition weapons worth of damage to your kit. My favorite is the missile type passives which give a chance on hit or on fire to just fire a new homing projectile. Some of these missile passives can chain, letting missiles fire missiles; though there seems to be an anti-infinite system in place to prevent them from just cascading out of control.
Other synergies involve killed enemies exploding, attacks providing ailments and ailments triggering other effects, and weapon hits bouncing, piercing, or firing additional projectiles. There's a ton of options.
The aesthetic conceit of Shape Shifter is shapes. Arenas are in simple geometric shapes: squares, triangles, octagons, etc. The boss of each arena is the some play on the shape of its arena. For example the five-sided arena brings forth the serpentagon boss, who is a snake of septagons. It's cute and gimmicky and I kind of love it. Aside from that, everything is very glowy sci-fi in an almost Tron sort of way. It's really my jam.
Difficulty wise, Shape Shifter is probably on the high end too. Getting a run or two under your belt isn't that hard, but to unlock some of the final ships you need to finish runs on the highest difficulty which requires either a pretty huge amount of skill or a ton of investment into the game's talent tree. The final talent in each of the tree's four paths can be upgraded infinitely, but at a pretty rapidly scaling cost. So while you can in theory scale infinitely, it requires a whole lot of time invested.
All in all Shape Shifter is probably my favorite.
I play too many of these games. There's like six others I've tried but I keep coming back to these. Why did I decide to ramble about them? I don't know, I haven't blogged in awhile. I should talk a bit about some of the RPG Maker games I've played though. Maybe soon.
tags: game_writeup, rpg