That Renfield movie with Nic Cage has a Vampire Survivors-style tie-in game, and it has no right to be this good

pcgamer.com:

I'm gonna level with you⁠—I did not have high hopes for Mega Cat Studios' tie-in game for Renfield(opens in new tab), a horror-comedy with Nicolas Cage playing Dracula in what looks like a riff on What We Do In The Shadows. I've been inundated with Instagram ads for it for awhile now, and my heart yearns to see anything else⁠—Traeger grills, meal prep services, topical CBD ointment, please, God, anything.

Wouldn't you know it though, Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood kinda whips. It passed possibly the most crucial test for me in that I sat down to play it for a quick «yea or nay» writeup and kept at it for way longer than I planned, promising «ok, this is the last run» to myself no less than four times. 

Renfield has the swarming hordes and auto attacks of Vampire Survivors, but instead of surviving for a set amount of time in a single play field, Renfield has a room-by-room setup more like a traditional roguelike. Clear all the baddies while picking up new attacks and leveling them up, then rinse and repeat. 

Renfield's basic gameplay benefits from some great pixel art animation, strong enemy variety, and an arsenal that, while not exactly balanced, feels really good to use. This game's equivalent of Vampire Survivors' whip and bible in particular feel great, with Renfield's «shadow claws» and «black bat» churning up crowds of enemies into chunky pixelated salsa.

At a certain point, things get spiced up with a sort of «level escape» mechanic for the last few rooms. The setup for each stage is that you've come searching for a helpless victim to bring back to Dracula, and once you reach them you get a Bioshock-style «Press X to harvest innocent creature, press Y to save them.» It's a lot less goofy in an arcadey pixel art