![]() ![]() MULTIPLE puzzles will have the item needed to solve them in the adjacent room. There’s no real “flow” state to environments, nor is the game shy about just spawning new enemies by the time you return to those areas. Oh by the way you need to save at least 30 people this way to get the good ending. It’s a game whose one unique idea is to give you a tranquilizer gun to knock out vampires (you can then sprinkle them with holy water to “cure” them) but said tranquilizer lasts like 10 seconds at most. It’s performing a bizarre pantomime of a Resident Evil game where it understands the controls, the UI, the way a pre-rendered background is supposed to look, but exhibits no meaning behind them. It doesn’t understand how to create an interesting environment, or the basic fundamentals of video game puzzle design, or why you’d want to run past an enemy instead of unloading on them. My point is more that Countdown Vampires doesn’t understand any of this. It’s a tricky needle to thread, but the actual nuances of that design aren’t the topic for today. ![]() If you give the player too many resources, it becomes something closer to an action game. Even in games with a more linear structure, the idea of resource expenditure and exploration plays a key part in Survival Horror as a “genre.” If you remove that, it’s basically an adventure game. Those games start with an environment that you slowly unwind and learn over the course of a handful of hours, with enemies acting as the obstacles. Take the Spencer Mansion of the first game, or the RPD of the second as examples of tight puzzle box environment design. To explain *why* Countdown Vampires is The Birdemic of Video Games, it’s worth considering what games like Resident Evil do correctly. It’s been like six months since I streamed this game and I still think about it. Few other games aspire to this level of exalted ineptitude, perfectly balanced between being “sort of playable” and “deeply incompetent.” It’s cargo cult game design at its finest and easily sits in the Dubious Hall of Fame. To call it a “bad Resident Evil clone” is like calling the Louvre a “building with some art in it.” It transcends mere badness and becomes high art, worthy of being put in the Louvre. Would I play again? I won’t pretend I wouldn’t.Ĭountdown Vampires has occupied an outsized place in my brain for the last few months, even among the weird shit I’ve played for this feature. If you'd like to find stream VODs of all of my playthroughs of these games, consider checking out my youtubes Countdown Vampires I love video games Should only need one more part after this. So here it is, a testament to my 14 years of writing dumb things on this silly webzone. I figured before I started my next dubious streaming project*, I might as well clean up The Tower of Dubious Horror Games.
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