Deathstate: Abyssal Edition
Here’s another game that precedes Vampire Survivors by a long while, in this case six years. Deathstate fits right in with the crowd, offering a brightly colored, chunky pixel rendition of the concept, where you auto-fire your way through large, enormously challenging levels, with an ever-growing cast of characters and abilities.
It feels a lot more like a traditional bullet hell arcade game in some ways, with flavors of Binding Of Isaac, not least with the detailed locations full of obstacles and items. But everything is in place to make this a VS alternative: you automatically fire whichever weapon you’re holding when enemies are in sight—it even aims for you—while gathering dropped gold bars to buy improvements, and collecting certain achievements unlocks new characters to play with and new items for the next run. The only significant difference is the paucity of drops.
It’s fascinating to rediscover these games from the previous decade, in the light of this year’s excitement, and realize it was pretty much all there already. The only catch here is that this precedes the bizarre-o cheapness, costing you an enormous ten whole dollars.
