I am gonna stage with you—I didn’t have excessive hopes for Mega Cat Studios’ tie-in recreation for Renfield (opens in new tab), a horror-comedy with Nicolas Cage taking part in Dracula in what seems like a riff on What We Do In The Shadows. I have been inundated with Instagram adverts for it for awhile now, and my coronary heart yearns to see anything—Traeger grills, meal prep companies, topical CBD ointment, please, God, something.
Would not it although, Renfield: Carry Your Personal Blood kinda whips. It handed presumably essentially the most essential check for me in that I sat all the way down to play it for a fast “yea or nay” writeup and stored at it for manner longer than I deliberate, promising “okay, that is the final run” to myself a minimum of 4 instances.
Renfield has the swarming hordes and auto assaults of Vampire Survivors, however as a substitute of surviving for a set period of time in a single play discipline, Renfield has a room-by-room setup extra like a conventional roguelike. Clear all of the baddies whereas choosing up new assaults and leveling them up, then rinse and repeat.
Renfield’s primary gameplay advantages from some nice pixel artwork animation, sturdy enemy selection, and an arsenal that, whereas not precisely balanced, feels actually good to make use of. This recreation’s equal of Vampire Survivors’ whip and bible specifically really feel nice, with Renfield’s “shadow claws” and “black bat” churning up crowds of enemies into chunky pixelated salsa.
At a sure level, issues get spiced up with a kind of “stage escape” mechanic for the previous couple of rooms. The setup for every stage is that you have come trying to find a helpless sufferer to carry again to Dracula, and when you attain them you get a Bioshock-style “Press X to reap harmless creature, press Y to avoid wasting them.” It is so much much less goofy in an arcadey pixel artwork recreation, and as soon as you have made your alternative you set off the Wario Land/Pizza Tower-esque timed escape.
Rescuing your goal as a substitute of bringing them to Dracula triggers a harder escape sequence with a tighter time restrict, however higher rewards. I dig the danger/reward component right here, and having the stress turned up for the previous couple of rooms of a run actually helps it really feel memorable—my first clear felt very hard-won.
Renfield is in early entry for the time being, and positively feels just a little barebones—there are solely three phases, and so far as I can inform just one playable character, although I count on that to vary within the three to 6 months Mega Cat estimates it would take to complete the sport. Nevertheless, like Vampire Survivors or Boneraiser Minions, Renfield is just 5 bucks on Steam (opens in new tab), and it seems like it would keep that manner via the complete launch—a fairly engaging worth proposition.
What an odd street the universally-maligned film tie-in recreation has taken. As soon as the realm of essentially the most 3/10 console video games you have ever performed ( you, Eragon (opens in new tab) for Xbox 360), now it is all these tongue-in-cheek riffs on indie video games. Properly, Renfield stands head-and-shoulders above that pack—it definitely beats one other smugly self-aware joke relationship sim, anyway.