Press X to believe
A bizarre indie game found its way into our inbox then into our reviewer’s heart.
Rating: 🦇 out of 5 stars.
Review by Charlie Clark
“I have seen enough to understand what he is attempting. This is not madness without direction. He is trying to bring something back. Not just in memory, but in form. To give it a body, a place to remain.” — “Dead Hunter’s Log,” Vampire Hunter: Nightrise
When developers Over the Moon Games pitched Fare Forward on reviewing Vampire Hunter: Nightrise, “a game where faith is the mechanic,” my morbid curiosity got the better of me. Bargain-bin shooters from the long tail of the Steam Store aren’t my kind of guilty pleasure, and I will be deriding generative AI as an overhyped slop factory even as Musk’s nanobots drag me off to the Ganymede penal colony. Nightrise, meanwhile, is a 3-hour, 3D Metroidvania that has been Frankensteined together out of AI-generated spare parts. Now it’s the only game I’ve ever 100 percent-ed.
When it comes to religion, Nightrise goes hard. I’ve never seen a cutscene make a theological claim before, but there it was: “Europe, 1600. . . Vampires and demons are real. So is God.” In addition to a stake-blasting crossbow, your church-sponsored vampire hunter wields a sharpened crucifix as both melee weapon and magical focus. Your spell-like abilities are powered by “faith,” a resource that slowly refills after you expend it to stun enemies or illuminate dark passages. You can recharge your faith faster by holding the spacebar, which causes your avatar to start making the sign of the cross and muttering honest-to-God Christian prayers, complete with the Most Holy Name of Jesus. Your maximum faith decreases when you encounter the boss vampire’s various abominations and desolations. It increases when you put the souls of enemies to rest, turning them in, like redeemable cans, at the glowing crosses that also serve as save points. Turning in souls also unlocks Blessings, passive upgrades to your abilities like stakes that explode into shrapnel or “Pray Master: Your faith allows you to pray 2X faster.”
During my 3-hour run, I had a grand time rotating fireplaces and stake-blasting werewolves, haunted suits of armor, and werewolves haunting suits of armor. As a millennial who did most of his video gaming circa 2004, the blocky textures of the castle’s walls felt like home, though I found it unheimlich when a werewolf from ‘08 would leap out from behind a statue from ‘94. The way Nightrise freely mixes dynamic shadows with vintage 2D sprites reminded me of Johnny Cash’s Cadillac in “One Piece at a Time,” its parts pilfered from the assembly line over the course of decades. There’s a pleasing amount of jank all around: A tutorial popup informed me that to refill my supply of crossbow stakes, I needed to dash through wooden obstacles. I giggled uncontrollably as I sent my warrior-priest Kool-Aid Man’ing through tables and chairs.
That’s the trouble with nostalgia. Nothing’s ever going to scratch that itch, because you’ll never play Chex Quest for the first time again.
Beneath the low-res gothic-horror mayhem, Nightrise is a game about how we respond to hardship and tragedy. The vampire whose home you are invading renounced his faith in the wake of his daughter’s untimely death and forged his own immortality as “The Spirit of Resentment.” Now, he’s a kind of mad scientist, searching for some arcane means to bring his daughter back, and his impious experiments are spreading corruption to the whole region. Your hunter is called to take the opposite path, embracing vulnerability and suffering. The vampire tempts you with offers of power, new spells on which to spend your shrinking pool of faith. Accept them and the vampire grows stronger. Give up your dark powers by pressing the button marked “Repent” (yes, really) and God will reward you with a weakened foe.
Nightrise is also about how Over the Moon Games made a devil’s bargain to build this strange little game in defiance of the industry gods. Their AI manifesto, like their final boss, is animated by a certain spirit of resentment. Times are hard for indie game developers, they say: “The conventional path asks a small team to spend a meaningful share of its time and money asking permission before development can even begin.” But by bleeding off some of the technical and artistic ichor coursing through our nation’s datacenters, Over the Moon found a way to make Nightrise so cheaply they could go it alone. “Hope is not an economic model,” they write. But vampirism is.
Having played Nightrise, I find many of the developers’ arguments in defense of their approach unanswerable. It works, it’s fun, do I really care that the arrangement of some of its 1s and 0s might be sort of stolen? I would be shocked if “AI assistance” isn’t nigh universal in game development already. Are we going to hang the petty thieves of Over the Moon while Epic rakes in another billion off of Fortnite skins? Still, I can’t help but note the irony of consorting with dark powers to make a retro shooter about a nostalgic vampire selling his soul to give false life to an impossible dream.
A common worry about generative AI is that it will crowd out quality by “driving the cost of bullshit to zero.” As Over the Moon puts it, ”Cheap generation can produce enormous amounts of noise, waste and disposable material when no one is exercising judgment.” Then again, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. One of my core memories as a gamer is playing Chex Quest, a Doom clone that General Mills released as cereal-box prize in 1997. You played a whole-grain space marine zapping mucus-flinging aliens called (I had to look this up) “flemoids.” It was slop. But I was seven, and I’d never played a first-person shooter before. I remember it fondly. I want to play it right now.
One thought I had while playing Nightrise was this: Some kid is going to randomly find this game and it is going to be their favorite game of all time. They will chase this particular high for the rest of their natural life. It will be 2055, and they’ll be warming a bioreactor on Ganymede from their Singularitank, searching on Steam for “games where you reload by smashing your body into furniture.” That’s the future I see for “cheap generation”: The long tail will grow to infinity as each consumer demands to repeat their unique formative experiences. But that’s the trouble with nostalgia. Nothing’s ever going to scratch that itch, because you’ll never play Chex Quest for the first time again.
In our diluvian future, there will still be encounters between player and game that crackle and spark with joy. But increasingly, these will be chance encounters. Like all other gifts of grace, they will not be had at the push of a button. They will not be conjured by a well-crafted prompt. That kind of deep magic is only found where it’s least looked for: the cereal box, the sleepover you didn’t want to go to, the clearance rack, the Fare Forward inbox.
