On Vampire Crawlers, Retro Rewind, and ShantyTown ► Ludology Now!

I’ve been trying a lot of different games recently, party because I am afraid to dive too deep into something before the release of 007: First Light, which I plan to get heavily invested in for a month or two. Until then, and for the past few weeks, it’s been an indie game parade of wildly different experiences, levels of polish, and interactivity. Here’s my main takeaways from Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors, Retro Rewind – Video Store Simulator, and ShantyTown, which is named correctly.

On Vampire Crawlers

Vampire Crawlers is Vampire Survivors by way of Slay the Spire and Valbrace. It’s exactly as addictive as Vampire Survivors was while offering a higher level of interactivity, and introduces a combo mechanic which gives the basic card battler gameplay a strategic twist; if cards are played in sequential order of increasing mana cost, damage increases and scales higher as the combo grows.

Much like Vampire Survivors, Vampire Crawlers has an almost overwhelming number of ability, modifier, and stat tweak combinations. It’s possible to play multiple runs basically the same, but it’s far more fun to experiment with all of the different cards, player characters, and options for variety the game offers. Turning a simple 0 mana, 8 damage card into your secret weapon simply feels excellent.

The biggest detriment to Vampire Crawlers is simply just how much it cribs from Vampire Survivors. Items, enemies, characters, locations, most of the artwork and sprites, all of them are basically just the same thing you saw in Vampire Survivors, but from a different angle. Yes, it was clearly a lot of work to translate the long scrolling levels of Survivors into a 3D environment for Crawlers, and the fact that it DOES look so similar is a testament to a job well done. However, it would be more fun to see brand new weapons and enemies from the team that brought us these already.

On Retro Rewind

Before that, I had been popping on Retro Rewind – Video Store Simulator for about thirty minutes every day, enough time to get through one or two in-game days of playtime. That’s about all I could take in a single sitting, as Retro Rewind accurately portrays the monotony of working at a retail store in the 90s so well that it kind of feels like work to play.

At first I was rather enjoying the experience. After you’ve set up your store shelves and bought some tapes for people to rent, the day-to-day follows a comfortable pattern of “check-in the returns, stock the shelves, open the store, pass out flyers, work the register until close.” Occasionally an NPC will request a specific movie, but it’s far more fun when they just give vague hints about what they are looking for, such as an “old” movie with “sci-fi” elements.

As your store inventory grows and you gain XP for renting, restocking, and rewinding returns, you unlock the ability to purchase things like snack stands, fridges for sodas, arcade cabinets, gumball machines, a kiosk to sell movies no one is renting, some customizable signs and film décor, and hire (eventually) up to two employees. You can expand your store a few times, and twice a week a man in a trenchcoat will appear in the alley behind the store to sell you cheap (and sometimes not-so-cheap) adult films.

That’s really about all there is. There’s fun to be had in all the parody movie titles your video store acquires, but once you play the game for a full year the “new movies” begin to repeat, and it quickly loses its charm. Likewise, you can only hire a second employee once you reach level 20, but once you reach level 20 there is nothing else to unlock and no further XP can be gained, even though the animations for increasing XP still flash on the screen with each action.

I also experienced a number of glitches while playing, including but not limited to: employees becoming intractable at random moments; NPCs dropping VHS tapes outside of the playable area and having no way to retrieve them; employees assigned to the return station getting stuck on an infinite loop of walking in circles with a single VHS tape in their hand despite there being ample places for said tape to fit on the shelves; NPCs refusing to leave the store at the end of the day, forcing me to restart the whole day over again; audio from in-game televisions becoming scratchy over time.

On ShantyTown

Most recently I’ve been playing ShantyTown, which bills itself as “a relaxing diorama-building game about finding beauty in everyday chaos.” Compared to the near seizure-inducing animations of Vampire Crawlers and the stress of ringing up a line of customers while the phone rings and someone else is standing there with a hand out waiting for me to hand them the latest copy of Die Trying, ShantyTown is a zen, meditative experience.

I’m not one for building dioramas myself, although I did once get halfway through a 1:24 scale model of an 18th century sailing ship. Still, I found the art style inviting and the concept intriguing, and while I don’t personally enjoy this sort of thing enough to get any kind of benefit out of the provided sandbox mode, I did enjoy building casinos on stilts, small villages around a lighthouse, and other small but dense hamlets. Gameplay in ShantyTown entirely consists of building these small scenes and then taking a singular photograph of your creation, and then you move on to another area.

There are some issues. ShantyTown stutters a bit on my (admittedly aging at this point) PC even at the lowest settings, an issue which seemed more apparent when in menus and when starting the game than during moment-to-moment gameplay. Really, the biggest problem I had was not really intuitively understanding how certain items improved their surroundings. There’s a highlight visual aid which tells you when something benefits its nearby buildings, but besides trial and error I never really knew where anything was supposed to go.

Of course, that is missing the point of just building something for the sake of building it. I understand that, and I understand I am likely not the best target for this sort of thing. I did want to try it out, though, and I am glad I did, and I do have one request for the developers of ShantyTown (and any game like it): Don’t just let us take pictures of the worlds we build, let us actually physically walk around in them. The “on foot” camera does not cut it.