Blood Dungeon Intro Shot
Image: Messhof

I'm not sure when it was drafted into international law that every indie developer needs to make a game in the vein of Vampire Survivors, but I guess that's just the world we live in. The latest to do their equivalent of video game jury duty is Messhof, developers of such lurid, twitchy arcade experiences as the Nidhogg series, Flywrench, and the vastly more chill Wheel World. And with today's release of the chaotic platform monster-grinder Blood Dungeon, they've brought all of the sensory overload and arcade sensibilities they have to the table, and none of the chill.

There's no story here. There's a dungeon full of monsters, a bunkhouse full of monster-slayers, and all the treasure-chests are packed with auto-firing, auto-aiming guns, swords, rocket launchers and more. Everything is rendered in scribbly MSPaint doodle style. Speaking of doodles, the Barbarian (featured in the launch trailer below) is completely nekkid, his magnificent golden locks and tiny pixellated dwingus (helpfully colored a slightly lighter shade of pink than the rest of his body) majestically billowing in the wind. This is not a particularly mature game. But it is a very smartly designed one, or at least that's the feel I got from my first dozen or so runs at its many monster-filled dungeons.

As an aside, you can turn off the nudity if that's a dealbreaker, but it's no more explicit than, say, Crazy Frog.

Also, I apologize for making you remember that Crazy Frog was a thing that existed.

Naked screaming guys aside, what immediately sets Blood Dungeon apart from the Survivors-like crowd is that this is a platformer too, and an intense one, feeling like playing Spelunky in fast-forward. Yeah, your ability to clear out enemies is dependent on your loadout, character choice, and all those other number-crunching good times, but your ability to avoid damage (five hits and you're dead) is almost entirely skill-based. You can run, jump and scamper up walls and across ceilings, and you'll need to use every bit of terrain available to just keep ahead of rushing melee enemies or monsters with aimed projectiles.

This dovetails nicely with the combat, too. As everything is much more lethal here than in most games in the genre, runs tend to be short and violent affairs, making those early low-level segments all the more important as you try to position yourself where you can deal the most damage to the most enemies while avoiding the constant threat of contact damage. Healing is available, but the chance of extra hearts dropping is just low enough to force you never to rely on them.

The dungeons (more unlocking as you complete the game's huge list of long-term objectives) are full of tricks and traps, too. Some are full of locked doors that require you to pick up keys along the way. Underwater areas allow for free but slow movement, the tension compounded by your oxygen gauge slowly ticking down. Some rooms lock you in, forcing you to dodge in an enclosed space until the timed door re-opens and lets you free.

Between runs, there's some roguelite progression going on, with you able to trade the bones you gathered on your dungeon runs to a dog wizard (living in a big doghouse in the little hub town you start in) to Bone Up and upgrade your base stats little by little. These will help smooth out the difficulty as you tackle the game's more complicated dungeon maps, but all your bone upgrades are ignored when you're doing daily score-attack runs, just to ensure that everyone's on an equal playing field.

While I've only spent less than an hour with Blood Dungeon, I can already tell this is something special, and has just enough of that fiery Messhof sauce to add some real kick to a formula I find a little bland normally. See, I don't dislike Vampire Survivors and its peers, but they're chill podcast games. You can put on something wordy to listen to while muscle-memory handles the rest. This is not a podcast game. You do not want to be focusing on someone's thoughts and opinions while dodging a constant barrage of monsters. Plus, you'd be missing out on the game's great dynamic 'dungeon drum & bass' soundtrack which escalates in intensity as enemies spawn and your damage output spirals.

Blood Dungeon is out now for £9.09/$10, with a 15% launch discount running until September 8th, plus a demo. While there's no discount bundles for Blood Dungeon, all of Messhof's other games are going cheap right now. Don't skip on the ultra-twitchy, polarity-shifting flappy-flying game Flywrench, which long predates Flappy Bird and is ten times as intense.