I am gonna stage with you—I didn’t have excessive hopes for Mega Cat Studios’ tie-in sport for Renfield (opens in new tab), a horror-comedy with Nicholas Cage enjoying Dracula in what seems to be like a riff on What We Do In The Shadows. I have been inundated with Instagram advertisements for it for awhile now, and my coronary heart yearns to see anything—Traeger grills, meal prep providers, topical CBD ointment, please, God, something.
Would not you recognize it although, Renfield: Convey 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 approach longer than I deliberate, promising “okay, that is the final run” to myself a minimum of 4 occasions.
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 subject, 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 fundamental 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 sport’s equal of Vampire Survivors’ whip and bible particularly 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 type of “stage escape” mechanic for the previous few rooms. The setup for every stage is that you’ve got 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 save lots of them.” It is rather a lot much less goofy in an arcadey pixel artwork sport, and as soon as you’ve got 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 larger rewards. I dig the danger/reward factor right here, and having the strain turned up for the previous few rooms of a run actually helps it really feel memorable—my first clear felt very hard-won.
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Renfield is in early entry in the mean time, and positively feels slightly 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’s going to take to complete the sport. Nevertheless, like Vampire Survivors or Boneraiser Minions, Renfield is simply 5 bucks on Steam (opens in new tab), and it seems to be like it’s going to keep that approach by means of the total launch—a fairly engaging worth proposition.
What a wierd street the universally-maligned film tie-in sport has taken. As soon as the realm of essentially the most 3/10 console video games you’ve got ever performed (taking a look at you, Eragon (opens in new tab) for Xbox 360), now it is all these tongue-in-cheek riffs on indie video games. Nicely, Renfield stands head-and-shoulders above that pack—it definitely beats one other smugly self-aware joke courting sim, anyway.
