Blood Dungeon is the future games deserve

Blood Dungeon is the kind of game that makes me want to simply repeat "BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON!" for 300 words and call this post done. It's the kind of game that felt like the future of the art circa 2010: a work with, regardless of team size, a clear authorial voice; with simple pixel art which seems to fizz; with ultraviolence and verve and arcade flair; with a sense of humour and an economy of design.

None of these things are a surprise. Blood Dungeon is the work of (among others) Mark Essen, the creator of Nidhogg, which I first played in 2010. His work felt like the future of the art then and it still does now.

For all Blood Dungeon feels like the product of a simpler era of freeware game design, it's also tied to indie gaming's most modern expression: the autoshooter. Like Vampire Survivors, your challenge here is to avoid enemies and kite them around while your weapons carry out their task automatically. This is married to a platformer in which you stick to every surface, letting you clamber up walls, hang from ceilings, and balance along tightropes with ease. There's no need for fiddly platforming, although there are new factors to consider like gravity.

This is a Survivorslike, sure, but it is much more significantly a Messhoflike.

If you've played one of these games, you have, in some ways, played all of them. You already know much of how Blood Dungeon functions. Enemies drop blood when killed (and in the game), which functions as XP. Collect enough blood and you'll be offered a choice of three upgrades. There are buffs to stats such as speed, damage, fire rate, bullet piercing, luck, as well as weapons to unlock like rocket launchers, machineguns, dual pistols, axes, flame boots, lasers, and many more. You also collect bones, which can be spent between missions on permanent upgrades to many of the same stats.

But this is a little like saying if you've played Mario, you've played all platformers. Blood Dungeon has personality that is unmistakably its own.

I have such fondness for that 2010 era of freeware games (which actually ran from something like 2007 until 2012) because you could follow a designer from their embryonic stages, like listening to a musician's bedroom demo tapes. Without financial incentives (or, y'know, money), the games were small, scrappy, and more often than not made with a game development tool intended to produce a specific, well-established genre. The only way to stand out was to do something weird and with character, and release after release, developers like Cactus and Petri Purho and Kyle Gabler would refine not only their skills but their voice. You could see what they cared about and the ways in which each of their early works eventually informed their commercial successes in Hotline Miami, Noita, and World Of Goo.

Essen was one of the masters of this period, through the flap-and-roll arcade perfection of Flywrench (which like Nidhogg got a full release via Steam later), the brutal masocore platformer Punishment: The Punishing, the transcendental bus chaos of Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, and the pistol duels and whiskey-pouring minigames of Cowboyana. Playing all of these games (and others) allowed Essen to develop and refine his work; they also allowed me to develop a relationship with that work, such that I now see how all of those games informed Blood Dungeon. This is a Survivorslike, sure, but it is much more significantly a Messhoflike.

The culture of videogames is impoverished in a world where so few designers get the chance to similarly develop their skills, and where the audience so rarely gets to see that work happen or develop a relationship with it.

None of which really matters when you are playing Blood Dungeon and are simply alive to the manic beauty of the thing, hoovering up blood and bones on a screen buzzing with bullets, crows, satyrs and giant wyrms. (I can see that Essen really cares about giant wyrms.)

Or put more simply:

BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON!