Game 32: Voltaire the Vegan Vampire

The intensity of Golden Light has left me needing something less stressful, but it isn't Halloween yet so 'scary' games time is still on. I own Voltaire the Vegan Vampire entirely by chance - on a whim I got a '25 random games for 25 bucks deal', and this is one of them. It's got Vampires, cutesy graphics, and farming. Let us begin.

The story, such as it is, is that I like broccoli and this is bad

Voltaire refuses to eat vampire things like blood and intestines and instead runs away to farm veggies for himself. Offended by this, Dracula sends minions every night to destroy my crops and make me hungry enough to go back to the old ways, I think.

If I can't grow enough veggies I'll go hungry

By day I forage around my little graveyard cottage to get seeds and resources.

Apparently sunlight is not a problem for Voltaire

By night, the game changes to a tower-defense style game where enemies attack your crops.

Leave the eggplants alone you fiends!

Combat initially strikes me as a bit lackluster - the enemies aren't really animated, the sprites just wobble back and forth at you. And there's no direct danger to me, the enemies focus entirely on the crops so I just need to kill things fast enough to prevent that from happening. You can obtain soul stones which you can use to acquire permanent upgrades - I suspect I can 'die' if I get too hungry and will need to start over.

All the upgrade are incremental boosts

On the farming side, various actions increase your hunger, so what I'm able to do when building up the farm is effectively limited by the food I can grow and protect. To grow food, you need to clear fields, plant seeds and water them, each of which requires a separate hunger cost.

Getting water in this game involves shaking it off of a 'droplet plant' and chasing the water around to catch it

The first thing that strikes me as interesting is that plants do different things - some provide food and simply refill hunger, but others actually act as defense towers and attack or slow enemies. After a disastrous first night of combat where I failed to defend lots of plants, I note that the more plants you put down the more enemies come for you, and having the defense plants makes your life easier when it comes to protecting your crops. I need to find the right balance to keep eating vs. keeping the crops safe. After a week of farming, the first boss shows up.

Mr. Skelly ran around outside the farm sending in minions, forcing me to abandon my crops to go get him

After defeating him, uncles Frank and Stein showed up to let me know I should head elsewhere via portal.

Unfortunately I forgot you needed soulstones to go through the portal and I spent them on upgrades so I'm stuck here for another week.

After being stuck in the graveyard for another seven days and repeating my battle against the same boss, I'm starting to suspect that this may not be a great game.

I've now reached the next area, which has the environmental effect of not showing me where enemies are approaching from. I have so much food leftover from the last map that I'm not sure I actually need to grow any, but I may as well.

I think this could feed me for a week, especially if I didn't expend energy farming plants.

My list of irritations with the game continues to grow - your special ability auto-targets enemies, but this is actually bad because the default special ability is an area effect that takes some time to fire and thus auto-targeting places it directly on a moving enemy that it won't hit. Another special ability that you can replace it with is a turret, and I'd rather place that where I want it than on an approaching foe.

And whoever thought chasing water around was a good idea should be made to eat vegetables forever

For this map I've decided to just consolidate all my crops around a single plot. The only way I lose crops is by trying to defend multiple separated plots, so instead I may as well just farm one - I may not earn as many plants as I could but I don't need them, especially when I'm not spending the extra hunger to maintain and re-plant lots of plants elsewhere.

Four defense plants and four food crops still gets me plenty more food than I need and are easy to protect

Your ranged projectiles move about as fast as you do so I don't see a lot of point to having them, I switched to melee attacks which seem to at least have an area-of-effect attack. I also got a 'melee attack trail' which seems to trigger often and did a lot of damage to the first boss very quickly. I've gotten through all the tutorial quests and now the game is giving me generic quests to do things like 'harvest seeds from wild plants' and 'craft a plank', which shows us that we've really hit the big time now. Speaking of the Big Time - how about the Big Top? One of the quest rewards is a carnival invitation, and I briefly, blissfully got to try doing something different.

Oh joy, carnival games!

Having tried each of them, most of them aren't that fun, are easily winnable, and generally produce more carnival tickets than you put into them. At 100 I can fight a boss, so I suppose I'll see what that's about.

Special shout-out to 'Yordelus' for being a guaranteed win of at least 3 tickets

Having purchased a boss fight, I get to fight this lovely fellow.

Please close your cape sir nobody wants to see that

Have I mentioned that the boss fights really... aren't? They tend to wander around and send minions at your crops but things in this game never hit YOU, so you're in no danger as you just walk next to them, hitting them repeatedly until they die - I suppose it's a battle between whether you can kill them faster than they kill your crops but there's no element of danger or strategy to it. The only good thing I have to say is that these battles are mercifully short.

This warthog rider tried to kill the crops himself, but that really didn't make the fight any different

The next area is desert. I suspect each level is a random combination of terrain and weather effect - now, what defines something as being a desert? That would be when it rains all the time, which is the weather effect I rolled for the desert, which means that I don't have to water my crops here.

It may not LOOK like it's raining but hey it's hard to see raindrops in real life too

At this point, I started to wonder if I could get by without planting anything at all. Sure, I'd get nothing to eat, but there should be fewer monsters if plants attract monsters, and I wouldn't be expending any hunger if I did no work, so theoretically it should work - and if it does I can just speedrun this game and get to the end of my suffering. And it IS a form of tedious suffering - at this point I've seen almost all of the plants in this game and there really doesn't seem to be anything else to it. Each zone requires that you survive 7 waves of enemies for the week to end and the boss to show up and those enemies are getting more numerous, like 80-90 come at you each night. In between nights you wander around the camp chasing water droplets (no you can't just take water from the lakes that are right there) and harvesting seeds. The minor irritations pile up, like you don't cut down a tree to get wood: Instead brushing past a tree has a chance to make it drop wood, and if it does then you have to double back to pick it up.

Not planting anything was a mistake

Thankfully I don't have to start the game over, so I'm not really sure it actually qualifies as a 'roguelike' in any form. I died because if you have no crops the beasties attack your main building, and without any defensive plants it's pretty hard to protect. I'll stick with the one-garden strategy, it's been working well and doesn't require a ton of effort to maintain.

The game offers a couple 'classes', starting you as 'Default Vampire'. This starter class lets you choose between three different abilities each level so there's a bit of variety in how you can customize yourself.

Thinking that I might see some interesting alternate options for powers and abilities I decided to unluck the most expensive class, the Pyromancer, under the assumption that most expensive = probably the most powerful. I was surprised to see that this afforded me a bit less customization than the starting class.

If your skill tree does not branch, you might be a redneck.

Where there were three power options per level for the basic Vampire, the most advanced class in the game just has straight power progression. It's still effective at fighting monsters (thankfully, because it made me restart from level 0), but boy does this contribute to my feeling like this game was never fully baked.

The boss of the desert? That classic, though rarely seen desert creature: The Sand-Rhino.

Why exactly is he helping Dracula?

This is probably the worst game I've blogged so far. I might create a new 'bad games' category just for it, and for whatever future awfulness is in store for me. I'm not enjoying the act of playing it, so I am continuing more because I'm curious as to what else may dwell within this trainwreck.

The boss of the snow area, 'Yeetus' (Latin for Yeti)

The pattern continues - hang around farming for seven days, fight boss, run somewhere else. Since the monsters always show up anyway on the first night I'm not clear on what we've accomplished by running away, it doesn't keep us safe at all.

Have I mentioned that the jokes in the game are all this good

The combat / effects in this game are not bad aside from the lack of sprite animations, it'd be easy to mistake this for a fun game at a glance.

This looks great but all I'm doing to win is walking in circles mashing the shoot/ability buttons

The boss of the forest area is a Treant, which is at least more fitting than a Sand-Rhino or a Vampire Pervert.

I guess Vampire Pervert at the circus was pretty appropriate, come to think of it.

Aw hell. I did it again. I have absolutely no excuse this time, I grabbed the soul stones from the boss and spent them on upgrades - and now I can't go through the portal to get to the next level (again) and I'm stuck in the forest for another week (again) and I will need to fight the tree boss (again).

'Pay to advance' mechanic takes the top spot on the anger list, above 'chase water droplets'.

On the next map I managed to make a garden that doesn't grow very much but it uses 'Nurse' plants so that it self-heals when it kills monsters, it's effectively invincible.

Hooray, now I can just do nothing and wait for over a hundred monsters to walk into my garden and die woo

Thus far we've faced other vampires, mythical creatures like yetis and treants, and one 'Sand Rhino'. Now we're down to a large bug. I think the creative juices have run their course.

Its name - and I am not making this up - is Bugbug

There is at least an attempt at making the boss fights have some variety, as in this case Bugbug flies around out of reach and occasionally lands for you to try to beat it up. Gameplay wise the problem is that your course of action remains the same no matter what the boss does - chase it around and beat it to death before it kills your garden (and thus far none of the bosses have proven capable of destroying a houseplant). One of the central tenets of good game design is to give the player choices, and Voltaire does have some.

I should have specified meaningful choices

The boss of this area is a Pirate. Ghost Pirate. I'm genuinely not sure how the fight works - most of the time I couldn't hurt him, but sometimes I could. Sometimes is enough, eventually.

All it did was draw out the battle. Unfortunately he wasn't on his ship for the fight.

For the last area we're going to... the castle grounds? We've been running away all this time and we're just going to go home now?

The plan is apparently to start yet another garden here at the castle for a week until something happens

I've built up so much extra food and water over the course of the game that I don't need to do actual farming here, so instead I fill every garden plot to the brim with angry killer plants.

This is a fully armed and operational petunia patch

With gardens this dangerous, I genuinely don't need to do anything but wait. When nighttime started I just went back inside the house.

This is me battling hundreds of foes on the final level of the game

After watching his son dig up the yard for an entire week, Dad has had enough and decides to personally stop his child from eating vegetables once and for all.

Braham Stoker would be puzzled

Dracula is a terrifying boss... in games like V-Rising and Castlevania. This is a legendary figure of fiction after all, with a degree of presence and intrigue bestowed on him from his first written incarnation to so many depictions of him in film and games. I must sadly report that Dracula's depiction in Voltaire the Vegan Vampire does not add much to Dracula's cultural significance - though I'll actually give them some credit for the boss battle itself, where Dracula focused his attacks on the house and was doing enough damage that it forced me to temporarily stop killing him to repair the house mid-battle, providing at least a hint of a challenge.

Dad I live in the shed now, leave it be!

After defeating Dracula and attempting (but failing) to reconcile with his father, Voltaire is ready to move on. He knows that Dad respects power, and must now give Voltaire proper respect since Voltaire defeated him. Well, I've certainly had enough with this game, time to move...

I'm sorry, what?

Uncles Frank and Stein just pop up and tell me I have to go fight the heretofore unmentioned Mother now? What?? Why? I thought I was done! There was pretty much an ending cutscene! It was... fine! Of all the sins committed, Voltaire teased me into believing that it was over and then just has to stick around for one more level. It has earned its rightful place as the first game in the Bad Games category.

This is Play All The Things, and I'm going to finish it, but I don't have to like it.

It's a 'Lava' level but the lake-creature we've been feeding is perfectly happy in said lava

You know, in a way I'm glad the game has continued, because I would have missed out. I would have missed out on seeing a palette-swap of water with lava, and I would have missed out on this incredible ability in my skill tree.... er, skill trunk.

I can't make Doppelgangers at all so this ability - that I must take - does absolutely nothing

Hold on, we just fought Dracula! What in the world are you going to follow THAT up with? Who's the ultimate boss of this game if not the ultimate Vampire?

I've been racking my brain for famous female vampires and I've got nothing in the Public Domain. Maybe Lilith? Sometimes she's the figurehead for a dark, evil mother figure.

I guess they couldn't think of anything either

She's not just lamer than Dracula, she's also easier, which really leaves me wondering why they tacked on a whole extra level for this. I mean, I suppose it wasn't hard to add since like the rest of the levels it's essentially a sprite / palette swap, but this game jumped the shark somewhere around the Sand Rhino.

Please don't hurt the volcano, I live there

I am grateful that Voltaire has run out of family members to hurt - having been defeated Mom gives him a hug and Dad shows up for a family photo.

A family photo which shouldn't show anyone because we're vampires. Ah well.

Dad please let me eat veggies and let Mom buy her own clothes!

Somewhere along the way I was asking myself if I was unfairly disparaging this game, if perhaps I wasn't enjoying it mainly because it's a very easy game and someone less experienced might enjoy it more - perhaps, given the silly theme, it's actually a game intended for children and all of these simplistic mechanics were simply designed to appeal to a younger audience.

Frank and Stein came to my rescue, unburdening me of these doubts when they dropped a 'Fifty Shades of Grey' reference. Thanks for that, guys.