Blood Dungeon is a chaotic bullet-heaven platformer that will have you climbing up the walls, literally. Your character sticks to everything in this platformer. It takes the irresistible formula of Vampire Survivors and applies it to 2D dungeon crawling for a frenetic and challenging arcade mix that makes you work hard for your rewards rather than letting you just sit back as optimally managed RNG runs its course. For that reason, it might be my favorite one of these yet.
The latest indie game from Messhof, best known for Nidhogg, Fly Wrench, and last year’s Wheel World, Blood Dungeon‘s pitch is fairly straightforward. You pick one of nine unlockable characters, embark on one of six unlockable dungeons, and juggle over 100 auto-firing upgrades to fight over 100 enemies to complete over 100 quests. Instead of just hopping from one surface to the next, you can crawl along walls and ceilings, hugging them like a caterpillar on cocaine. Each arena has its own theme and design—one takes you underwater while another is an endless well—but the enemies inside and the locations of certain upgrades are randomized for each run.
You get upgrades by collecting blood from the stuff you kill. It might give you a laser beam or a sword that spins around you. Rare charms might let you freeze enemies or zombify them. As you play and die, more stuff gets unlocked, and the builds start to get more exotic. Basketball weapons will bounce between the walls. Spiderweb guns will shoot webs you can then use to climb in midair. Instead of just balancing upgrades that scale with overall survivability, you’re considering which upgrades might make it easier to navigate 2D mazes and dodge the increasing waves of enemies that populate them.
Blood Dungeon is in the lo-fi doodle art style of designer Mark Essen’s previous solo projects like Nidhogg. The enemies and characters exude a combination of whimsy and irreverence. One character is nude with censor bars across their body and moves only by doing cartwheels. A machine gun icon looks very much like a dick and balls. And one of the bosses, a giant worm, is right out of Nidhogg. The soundtrack by Thomas Hoey, who also composed the music for Wheel World, fills each dungeon with its own unique, trance-like vibe. All of this was neat enough, but I wasn’t prepared for just how deeply Blood Dungeon would sink its pixelated meat hooks into me.
Vampire Survivors games are great at exploiting that feeling that just getting to the next upgrade will solve all your problems, especially once you die and it’s game over. Just one more run to get a luckier drop and all will be well. Otherwise you don’t really do much in the game itself other than the buildcrafting equivalent of counting cards at a casino. Some Survivors-likes have tried to solve for that by giving you more agency over avoiding the hazards flying around the screen, but none that I’m aware of have injected what is essentially Diablo-style RNG into the classic, Mario Bros.-esque 2D platformer as well as Blood Dungeon.
While Messhof has leaned on comparisons to Spelunky and the way that you’re constantly scrolling through levels in search of new secrets and unlockables when asked about Blood Dungeon‘s inspirations and influences, I think there’s a bit of Pac-Man DNA in Blood Dungeon as well. The mazes you’re exploring have an urgency as if the walls are constantly closing in. Sit still and you’ll be got. Move in the wrong direction and you might get trapped in a dead end. It’s only after repeated playthroughs that you start to memorize the larger structure of the arenas and are able to begin making split-second decisions about which tunnel to follow where and what your plan-B and plan-C exits might be along the way when things fall apart.
This is the part of the game that’s kept me coming back. Dying and grinding to unlock new secrets is cool. Getting your favorite upgrade—in my case the laser beam—three times in a row to power it up into a path-clearing nuke is a lot of fun. But the cat-and-mouse chase as my knowledge of the dungeons grows makes me feel like less of a dopamine-drip-fed pawn in the whole affair. I’m only five hours into Blood Dungeon, but unlike Ball X Pit, which made me feel vaguely gross about wanting to continue playing, Blood Dungeon feels like an arcade cabinet I want to spend all week saving my quarters up for until I’ve mastered what it has to offer.