God of War:Ragnarök and Elden Ring swept major game awards for 2022. Consequently, everyone thought one of the two games was going to receive the British Academy (BAFTA) Video Games Award for best game on March 30. The result? A one-man developed indie game: Vampire Survivors.

Vampire Survivors is a simple game. Players walk around the map, avoiding enemies while automatically attacking them as they get near. With each attempt taking at most 31 minutes, players use Castlevania-inspired weapons and tools to help them survive. What’s most impressive is that the game was developed almost alone by Luca Galante, who released the game for 4.99 USD on Steam as early access in 2021. As soon as Vampire Survivors was released, the game received overwhelmingly positive reviews for its simple yet addictive gameplay. How did a game of just walking around become so addictive?

To understand the success behind Vampire Survivors, we need to first understand its game design and its roots. It is difficult to define the genre of Vampire Survivors. It has roguelike aspects in a way that each 31-minute run is different and players start from scratch every game. However, unlike other popular roguelike games such as The Binding of Isaac or Hades, Vampire Survivors has enemies swarm toward the players while they are given random choices of weapons and tools to obtain and upgrade as they level up. Vampire Survivors is akin to bullet hell games, where players have to avoid barrages of enemies, but they can become the bullet hell generator, decimating enemies that barely get near with the right combination of weapons.

With bits and pieces of other genres, Vampire Survivors established a unique genre of its own: a “survivor” genre. Granted, Vampire Survivors wasn’t the first of its kind. In 2019, a Korean game developer, LEME, released Magic Survival on mobile game stores. However, the bland graphics and tone of the game did not gather as much attention as Vampire Survivors. Although Galante did mention how his game was inspired by Magic Survival, Vampire Survivors’ version of the survivor genre with its low pixel sprite, flashy effects, and nostalgic 8-bit music captivated gamers all around the world, and further inspired other game developers to follow the style.

The biggest reason behind the success of the survivor genre is its brevity and simplicity. Throughout the development of different game genres and styles, a shorter, simplified version of a well-established genre has always gained more attention and popularity. Just as multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA) are a shorter and simplified version of role-playing games (RPG) and real-time strategies (RTS), the survivor genre is a simplified version of the roguelike genre.

Roguelike games are tempting for indie developers. The randomness and hard reset of each run make its replay value high without much effort compared to other genres. Players could finish each run differently and play again to experience the same fun all over again. As such, the roguelike genre was saturated with unambitious copies of other successful games, with only a handful gathering positive reviews. However, Vampire Survivors takes this replay value of roguelike and makes it more addictive by setting a clear time limit for each run. Other popular roguelike games could take as long as an hour, with most runs taking longer than 30 minutes. This shortened version of roguelike along with simpler controls lowered the entry barrier for new players as the game became easier to play. There is no need to know precisely when to dodge an enemy attack or how to use other tools to help beat the game. Players would receive as much achievement and enjoyment by simply walking around.

While brevity and simplicity are the main reasons, they are not the only ones. The creative mechanics of different weapons, different characters, and flashy visuals make the overly simple gameplay fun and addicting. The limited weapon space with different possible synergies makes its replay value even higher, grabbing players for hours, not to mention the low price and constant updates from the developer. Compared to other survivor games, it goes to show that even if a style of game is a proven formula for its success, it is ultimately the details and efforts put into its development that distinguish a successful game from a mediocre one. Just as one review says, “There is no escape. You press play, and it’s 3 a.m.”