My big fat Italian vampire-slaying family

theverge.com:

I was floored as soon as I got to the main menu of Vampire Survivors. I knew this hot indie darling sounded up my alley when I heard it described as a reverse-bullet hell blended with a roguelike, but I was not prepared for it to hit so close to home. While the main menu looks low-rent and the Castlevania-inspired aesthetics seems at first like a poor imitation, what stopped me in my tracks was the starting character. Antonio Belpaese: the first in a lineup of four Belpaese family members and a menagerie of other characters with incredibly Italian-sounding names. Even before playing a minute of the game, I was enthralled by my namesake taking the lead. As I struggled through the first few runs and slowly unlocked more characters, I felt like this game represented me and my big Italian-American immigrant family in a small way that elevated the whole experience like few games I have ever played.

When people talk about Vampire Survivors, it’s all about how much fun the mechanics of the game are and how it’s blown up on Steam for the cheap Early Access price of just $3. The gameplay is indeed exceptional. You try to survive an onslaught of increasing numbers of baddies using only auto-firing weapons, slowly improving your arsenal with pickups and passive power-ups. It’s a roguelite that gives that dopamine hit as the numbers go up and is completely devoid of a story, but it is rich in culture. Specifically, my family’s culture.

Vampire Survivors’ creator, Luca Galante, told my colleague Jay Peters in an interview that he often gets stuck coming up with lore, backstories, and meaning for the characters in his games. “The technical aspects are what [I] understand properly, but stuff like writing a story, especially for the