V is for Vampire
And also vengeance
Newsletter #137
In addition to writing, and finally getting a few things off the ground I wanted to in that arena (news on that soon), I felt a lot of need to unwind this week, and so spent a lot of my free time gaming. We watched Azrael with Samara Weaving, a movie that definitely deserves its own newsletter entry, but also one that’s hard to discuss without spoiling too much of it. Beyond that, it feels like the kind of experience that needs to percolate before I’m ready to talk about it. That being said, my capsule review is that it’s a good flick and worth viewing; there’s no dialogue, but the lack of dialogue heightens the suspense and allows the viewer to participate more in the creation of textual meaning than usual.
My gaming choice of late has been V Rising, an action-rpg with heavy crafting and building elements. Like indie darling Valheim, the game centers itself on its crafting and building systems. Unlike Valheim, there are certain reasonable restrictions placed on building that streamline the process and relieve some of the tedium I feel with other similar survival games. Yes, there’s gathering resources, a process that accounts for a hefty portion of playtime involves the typical survival game’s swinging weapons at rocks, trees, and other destructible parts of the environment that yield the materials needed for crafting. The amount of resources yielded during gathering is well-balanced, though, and doesn’t feel inordinately weighted towards grinding out enough imaginary resources to proceed.
As with many games of its type, V Rising ties character progression to the quality of gear they’ve equipped, gear for which - you guessed it - you have to seek crafting recipes and corresponding materials to create. Most of these recipes can be researched via the slow ramp of unlockable buildable technologies i.e. as in real life, you get better at building and figuring out how to build things by building things. Some of these technologies are locked behind boss characters, though, and present a natural bottleneck in the gameplay that require the player to engage with the larger open world and its various combat systems. Here, where so many of its genre fail, V Rising shines.
The most immediate comparison V Rising’s combat invites is to Diablo; the isometric camera angle is a bit of a red herring, though. I suppose it has some similarity in combat pacing to Diablo II, but even that combat was a frenzied, blood-soaked mosh pit next to V Rising, which teaches you very quickly that it’s easy to be outnumbered and overpowered by a relatively lean group or under-leveled enemies. Over time, the combat takes on a pace and feel much closer to the measured risk-reward involved in the very differently presented (though still action rpg) Souls games about which I’ve raved here so frequently. Even that’s a bit of an over-complication of what V Rising’s combat represents; ultimately, it boils down to thoughtful positioning and use of special abilities. While none of the boss fights are themselves as complicated as anything in the Souls series, they nonetheless represent skill-testing gates that can - sometimes - be balanced a little too much in favor of punishing the player. That said, there’s a feeling of accomplishment and advancement when putting a particularly nasty foe to bed that rewards patience and attentiveness.
I enjoy games like that, but I don’t always enjoy beating my head against a particularly dense wall, so V Rising is a nice step back from both Diablo and Souls games that brings the leisurely fun of building your personalized stronghold to the equation, and so gives the player a wider range of options for emergent gameplay. This may be the game that changes my mind about survival games in general. With that in mind, I’d say it’s a safe bet to check out on your own, because I don’t even normally like crafting-heavy games. In this case, the crafting and building are so well-integrated and streamlined that they never feel tedious.
Y’all have a good week! Be kind to yourself and others and don’t wait to make that thing or so that thing or read that thing or watch that thing. You deserve it.
Wado!