I love “Vampire Survivors” and all of its pseudo-Italian antics. I love its admiration/theft of “Castlevania” 8-bit aesthetics, its addicting and tight gameplay loop, its simplicity, and the subgenre it spawned (that I lovingly call Garlic-likes). It’s one of my favorite go-to comfort foods in recent years, and its massive amount of DLC will make it last until I’m long and buried.

But then these god damn devs had to go and create an equally compelling and flavorful spin-off. With cards. Fucking hell. I don’t have time for this bullshit!

That’s a lie — I very much do. In fact I had the requisite 15 hours to beat “Vampire Crawlers,” which is the deck-building dungeon-crawling card-acquiring sibling of “Survivors.” In fact, it’s in the name (“The Turbo Wildcard From Vampire Survivors”)! And while it doesn’t take as long to play, doesn’t have as much content out of the box, and reuses literally every asset available, this feels right at home with the original. The garlic tastes just as good here as it does in the first one.

While the fireworks still go off when you open chests, the glitz and glammer give way to an entirely different game in terms of pacing. Here, the game is a slow, methodical dance of death playing cards against enemies in a dungeon. You go through the floors and fight a boss at the end. And, of course, that measured pace quickly gives way to flinging cards real fast, blazing through levels, grinding up XP, adding to your deck, and then you realize it’s been 12 hours straight and you haven’t eaten a meal or gone to the bathroom.

This is a phenomenal package for an excellent price, and I’m never going to tire of its idiosyncratic quirks. Like, what the fuck is “Santa water,” and why does every playable character have a name that is basically Gionna Daddio or Vinnie Pasquantino? In any case, this is just an exquisite asset flip that still lets my brain fill my body with dopamine and serotonin.

The main hook of chaining combos together (using ascending mana and filler cards to keep the combo going) is the main source of your damage, and the strategy of assembling and piloting a deck.

I can already tell that when more playable crawlers join the game and new maps are introduced, my urge to upgrade more cards and buy power-ups will increase ten fold. And that pisses me off, because I have other things to do god damnit! My time is precious and valuable, and I do not like it being disrespected with yet another GOTY contender dropping in the same time span as “Saros,” “Pragmata,” “Mouse: PI for Hire,” and all the other things on my backlog.

God damn it.

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Image Credit: “Vampire Crawlers”