Skilled Ugly Chaos

Talking about Blood Dungeon is impossible without making at least some reference to Vampire Survivors. Blood Dungeon is clearly born from Vampire Survivors’ undeniable loop and sense of progression, but developer Messhof addresses arguably the primary shortcoming of the 2022 Bullet Heaven game (I think that’s what we’ve agreed to call these, right?): movement. Moving in Blood Dungeon is fun and it sets the game apart within the genre and demands enjoyable skill from the player, but some balance annoyances keep the game from soaring.

Blood Dungeon is a functional platformer before you are even awarded the first upgrade to your starting weapon. The nine characters play similarly (though there are two that feel fairly different), and they leap with ease, can climb any wall or ceiling, clamber along fences, and even swim. If there weren’t sometimes hundreds of enemies on screen, I can confidently say that Blood Dungeon would probably work in the platformer genre.

Despite the quality platforming, however, Blood Dungeon is more about powering up and staying alive. Like Vampire Survivors, you defeat enemies, collect the titular blood, level up your weapons, acquire new ones, and choose between a series of passive upgrades that appear randomly. If you’ve played a game in this genre, you know what to expect, and it does the style well. Some upgrades feel useless, but many more are easy selections when they appear in the roulette. A few, however, feel required. I don’t know that I ever beat a final boss without the basketball (which sends a flurry of orange balls bouncing around the environment) or the upgrade that doubles everything. I hit a point where I was rerolling frequently to get those two upgrades, and when I couldn’t, it often led to disappointing failure. I would have preferred the weapons to feel similarly powerful, even if they all played differently, which I recognize is a difficult balancing act.

Blood Dungeon is also surprisingly challenging, which has its pros and cons. The genre is successful at rewarding players who make smart decisions more than their ability to dodge enemies. The power fantasy is staggering at the end of a great run in a Bullet Heaven game, but I never quite felt all-powerful here, even when I successfully defeated the three bosses of any given level (which is how you beat a level). That’s the con, but the pro is that Blood Dungeon is a much more active and intense game, and when your platforming skills are what save you more than randomly getting the basketball, that is rewarding.

Bones awarded at the end of each run can be used for permanent upgrades, which is great; I eagerly invested in the elements of my characters I wanted to improve, but I hit a wall earlier than I expected. I ran out of upgrades to buy, and the requirements to access the few unlockable upgrades were unclear. This led me to amass a large bank of unspent bones while I hoped I'd triggered something to unlock the other purchasable upgrades, which felt random rather than rewarding.

The final element of Blood Dungeon that sets it apart from comparable games is its art style, which I don’t love. The characters are purposefully ugly, and it all feels intentionally gross. The fart cloud, which casts a very useful periodic cloud of poison, for example, is an upgrade I would sometimes avoid just because I wasn’t eager to hear my character fart every few seconds. But all that said, it is undeniably unique and perfectly fits the game’s overall mood and tone. The style just isn’t going to work for everyone, and I happen to technically be an everyone.

Blood Dungeon is a refreshing take on the genre Vampire Survivors popularized only four years ago, and it effectively establishes its own identity both with its art style and platformer-focused mentality. It is fun to play, whereas many of these games are ultimately fun to experience passively – a build to the point where you can put the controller down and watch chaos blaze across the screen. You can’t ever put the controller down in Blood Dungeon, and that’s why it’s so easy to spend your bones (if you haven’t already purchased everything) and jump right back in for another run.