Here’s a two-word video game review for you: Blood Dungeon. That’s it. That’s the review.
No, really, what more do you need me to say? It’s a video game called Blood Dungeon. Bless developer Messhof, the studio behind Nidhogg and Wheel World, for giving its latest game a title that tells you exactly what you’re getting with this lo-fi Vampire Survivors riff upfront. It’s like seeing a store-brand cereal called Sugar Balls. No confusion about what’s in that box! As it says on the tin, Blood Dungeon is about as lowbrow as video games get — and that’s exactly what I ordered. It’s a proudly crude roguelike built for a generation raised on Adult Swim. Sometimes, you just crave something that dares to be stupid.
Blood Dungeon is, essentially, Vampire Survivors if it were remade by a 12-year-old in Microsoft Paint. Poncle’s retro pixel art has been replaced by misshapen doodles colored in with magic markers. Splotchy blue birds and disembodied hands roam around 2D arenas that look like they were made from texture stamps. It’s like opening your kid’s school notebook and having the horrifying realization that they are not, in fact, paying attention in math class. That lends Blood Dungeon a sense of gleeful immaturity that I was ready to embrace immediately.
The gameplay follows all the basic rules of Vampire Survivors. You pick a misfit character (my favorite is a nude dude who moves by cartwheeling, the Skinja) who has their own starting weapon and perk, move around a level as your weapon auto-fires at enemies, and pick up new upgrades as you collect blood to level up. Blood Dungeon is a DPS arms race, even more than Vampire Survivors, with an emphasis on getting your baseline power up to snuff over crafting tricky builds. That can make the decision-making feel a little limited, but there’s still room for aha moments. My best run to date had me focusing on upgrades that cut down my weapon cooldowns (reducing them when I was at full health and standing in a spawned circle) until I was killing bosses before they even appeared on-screen. Get stuffed, Bone Dragon!
Blood Dungeon is a high-score chase first and foremost.
If you don’t enjoy outfitting a tiny hero with shotguns and rotating swords until they slowly transform into a mobile murder machine, Blood Dungeon isn’t likely to change your mind — but it might. The most noticeable difference is that Blood Dungeon is a 2D platformer, so you have to slink around obstacles while dodging swarms of enemies. It’s a slight tweak, but one that gives the action a jungle gym energy. You’ll clamber up chain fences, hop over spikes, and swim through water tunnels in a handful of arenas that play with terrain in different ways. It’s a more active variant of the formula that gives you something to do aside from moving your joystick and choosing between three upgrades.
The more meaningful change, though, is the pace of a run. A game of Vampire Survivors is a bit of a commitment. You can’t claim victory unless you survive 15 to 30 minutes, leading to slow-building runs where you spend a lot of time standing around until the tension starts to ramp up. Sometimes you make it to the 20-minute mark only to learn that your build just doesn’t cut it, leading to a fast death. Blood Dungeon escalates much quicker and has multi-tiered victories, which makes bad runs feel like less of a waste of time. The ultimate goal of a level (or at least the way to properly “beat” it and earn a crown) is to survive long enough to beat three bosses, but you’ll unlock new stages so long as you can beat the first one. Every achievement after that is a matter of chasing unlocks and bragging rights.
The inclusion of online leaderboards signals that Blood Dungeon is a high-score chase first and foremost. Beating a level is fun and all, but obliterating your friends’ bone count and rubbing it in their face is the real reward. I got competitive — okay, toxic — during my few weeks with it, sending screenshots of my scores to friends who were also reviewing it to taunt them. (In my defense, I beat their asses so goddamn bad, dude.)
Also, did I mention that the name of the game is fucking Blood Dungeon? That’s pretty crucial.
Even though I’ve played plenty of games that are similar to Vampire Survivors, like Megabonk and Brotato, the quicker pace of Blood Dungeon finally helped me understand why I’m so drawn to the format. Vampire Survivors feels like a modern arcade game. I can imagine walking up to a cabinet with a handful of quarters and trying to see how far I can get in a run, as I still do with Ms. Pac-Man anytime I find it in the wild. Plenty of roguelikes fit that description, but Vampire Survivors stands apart by being squarely focused on a streamlined style of play that’s easy to learn and hard to master. It subtracts where so many of its peers pile more systems on top of the ones popular games have established; Vampire Survivors is more a continuation of Asteroids than Hades.
Blood Dungeon fully leans into that philosophy. I love firing it up for a single run, rather than compulsively sitting with it for hours on end. I set a new high with a build that involves a basketball and two Desert Eagles, and then turn it off and return the next time I’m bored to see if any of my sorry ass friends have managed to beat me. (Fat chance!) It only took me around six hours to properly clear each level and nab over 50% of the unlocks. Great! Now it sits permanently installed on my Steam Deck like Space Invaders on a multicab. I know I’ll get the urge to fire it up on a lazy Sunday.
That’s not to say that it’s an elevated take on Vampire Survivors that revolutionizes the “Bullet heaven” subgenre. Blood Dungeon is a shallow riff on the formula. There are a lot of toys to experiment with, but there’s not too much depth. There are only a few levels in the game currently, and at least one of them is a dud. (Trying to fend off enemies underwater while grabbing oxygen bubbles to stay alive? No thanks!) It can feel like a quick prototype for a bigger idea, a Hail Mary thrown by Messhof to nab a hit in the wake of its more ambitious Wheel World.
It will either find its audience or it won’t. And its audience is people who see the name Blood Dungeon and think, “haha, hell yeah.” And brother, as someone who is squarely in that group of Neanderthals, let me tell you that it’s hitting the spot. Shotgun shoot 13 shells at skeleton head. Big sword go spin. Ha ha. Blood good, want more blood.
Blood Dungeon will be released Aug. 25 on Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Messhof. You can find additional information about gamexplore’s ethics policy here.
