What makes a genre defining game?
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors reinvigorates a new(ish) formula
Every game is an idea.
This is not a particularly special or insightful thing. Every piece of art is an idea. So it would make sense that games are ideas as well. But what makes games interesting is that the ideas build upon each other in ways that feels closer to technological leaps and bounds than storytelling. Each new game in a genre feels like an experiment. A proposal about what the boundaries of that idea might be and how we might interact with it.
One of the fun parts of games is getting to play with that idea. To test its boundaries. You’re not just thinking about consuming something, you’re actively participating in building a perspective of the world based on that set of rules.
Loving games, on some level, is about loving the discovery of those sorts of ideas, big and small.
Some of these experiments are small and iterative. And some of them are massive.
But two of the most interesting ideas in gaming are the new idea and the genre defining idea.
Magic the Gathering, for example, single handedly invented the Trading Card Game genre. Sure, the existence of packs of cards existed, and modular play and all that jazz. But it changed the way we thought (and think) about packaging components of play together, for better at worse. Spelunky, on the other hand, defined the concept of roguelike for a generation. The roguelike genre existed but Spelunky imagined bold new avenues for designers to crawl down to create new experiences for players.
Every time I get to run into one of those games it feels awe inspiring in some small way. The existence of any game, digital or otherwise is a minor miracle. And games that manage to capture some slice of the universe in a way that feels untested is special.
Weirdly enough, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors1 is that game for me. At least most recently.
What is a Survivors-like?
Vampire Survivors is a genre-inventing game. It’s a game about shooting down ever increasing hordes of monsters in incremental waves, and upgrading your abilities over time. As Indie Game Clinic describes, it’s a game about building this sort of flow state where you continually live on the edge between awesome power and overwhelming destruction.
It is a simplification of parts of the bullet-heaven style game, clicker games, engine building games, and horde battler style games with a tower defense style economy.2 And when it came out it spawned a whole generation of similar games like 20 minutes til Dawn, Brotato, and more recent ones like Entropy Survivors or Rocket Rats.
Where Vampire Survivors Struggles for Me
I really enjoyed many of my play-throughs of 20 Minutes Til Dawn, the version I got into at the recommendation of a friend, much later. And it’s a really compelling game. It’s basically a flow and discovery mechanism slapped onto one another. You collect money when you defeat enemies to upgrade and discover new equipment. Rinse and repeat.
But, the game also falls into fairly predictable play patterns over time. You move around not unlike a sandwalker across Arrakis, in this sort of stutter step dance to get monsters close enough to dispatch and collect, but then run away before the can overwhelm you. And then as the game progresses it turns into something more akin to powerwash simulator. Where instead of attacking grime, you are blasting away at hordes until they finally overwhelm you.
All of the games come with a variety of different character classes with move speeds and abilities, mostly in the form of the rate of fire and patterns of their various guns. But this, for the most part also only changes the first component of the game, eventually everything becomes a crab. Or, in this case, a power washing tool.
What Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor Gets Right
Deep Rock Galacti:c Survivor adds levels, additional goals and quests during the runs, and the challenge of mining through rock to vary up the gameplay.
I think the challenge with survivors-likes generally is that each play experience, both between games and also between runs doesn’t actually feel that different from one another. You pick a specific set of upgrades you’re interested in speccing out and you enjoy that dopamine hit of discovery when you get to experience the new unlock for the first time. But in retrospect, it’s hard to define what playing them actually feels like, and how they differ from one another. So those minutes can feel, for me anyway, like the gaming equivalent of empty calories.
Mining
The crucial addition here, is mining. by creating these hunks of rock that you can either leave or attempt to mine through, it adds dynamism to a game by letting you shape (or not) the world around you. It creates the possibility for daring escapes where you avoid a horde of bugs by tunneling through rocks to a safe spot at the last moment. And within those rocks, there are additional resources that you can choose to collect (at the cost of moving slower), which adds a risk reward element of helping you when you’re further on in your runs.
Fundamentally Survivors-like games are about positioning and movement. But, for the most part, that positioning and movement is the same game to came. Introducing new obstacles and risks versus rewards creates new opportunities to change the type of movement required, and hopefully make more play experiences.
Extraction
Every level has a clear beginning and an end. You start on the empty map, survive long enough to draw out the big bad, defeat the big bad, and then have to race back to your rig in 30 seconds in order to get to the next level. The tension adds a clear narrative arc, and also ups the ante when it comes to making sure you defeat the big enemy, but also have enough health to make it back through the hordes of smaller bugs.
Runs End
And mercifully, runs end. The 5 levels you have to complete gives you an end goal to actually hit, and differentiate the experience of different attempts with new characters and challenge ratings. It also means if the game is hard and you find yourself losing before you make it out, you have a target to hit.
It also meant I had specific stories to talk about and share with friends. Surviving on 6 remaining health after beating the final boss on my first successful run, or encountering lava fields and learning how to navigate them on the second world.
Why Does it Matter if this is Genre Defining?
Selfishly, I think this sort of approach to the survivors-like genre creates a level of variability that will open up a new vein3 of exploration for the design. It’s hard not to imagine the possibilities of what other exploration style mechanics could be added to further stretch and explore the genre.
There’s also a part of me that thinks games can be fascinating designs without being meaningful experiences in their own right. Vampire Survivors is, great, but it can feel more like a fascinating exploit loop in the human brain than a meaningful experience. The constraints and additions that Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor adds feels like the type of additions that deepen the game and connect it to memory-making and shared experience in a way that the original didn’t have, and I find that exciting and empowering.
The Games
Rocket Rats is close to the exact opposite of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. I found out about it on a Polygon review and decided to take a look. I think I appreciate most how simple it is and how much it focuses on the unlocks and upgrades. It’s a delightful experience that allows itself to be cute and short.
This is, by no counts a Survivors-like or a video game. I’m not even sure it’s possible to make a tabletop version of a Survivors-like game. Instead, this is a board game about dwarves and mining. I suppose if I really want to tie this together I would say something like it’s an inherently random easy to play game where you spend your time picking dice from a fun setup.
It’s never gotten the love it deserves and with two new expansions coming out this year, I think it’s worth a second look.
And the game itself. It’s a good game. Definitely the most expensive on this list, but it’s the type of game that’s worth sharing with friends and that you can go back to repeatedly without feeling sucked in or trapped.
What is it with the recent run of game titles that feel like a journey just to express? And unfortunately, I can’t even shorten this to Deep Rock Galactic because that’s the original mining game that the survival game is based on! Sheesh
There’s definitely a joke about everything becoming a crab in evolution, where every game actually becomes a mishmash of survivor horror civ building with roguelike mechanics and metrodivania style gameplay. No it doesn’t matter if these words mean nothing to you, the genre-fication of games will continue until morale improves.
Aside to the aside. There is some meaning here, but I think it’s just more reflective of how modern games see these sorts of mechanics as elements in a toolbox to engage players, more than a genre in their own right. But these sorts of elements are also what helps them attract certain sets of players, and so the descriptors remain.
Pun regretfully intended.