The unbelievably chaotic, compellingly addictive roguelike Vampire Survivors doesn’t feel like the most obvious candidate to be adapted from video game to comic book. Everything seems thrown together almost at random, with off-the-shelf enemies and bizarre misspellings of places, names and objects all over the busy, real-time monster slaying experience.

Yet somehow, this first issue does a great job of pulling together lots of seemingly unrelated parts and making it into a more coherent whole.

The story starts with Belpease brothers bickering over the disappearance of their sister, before she shows up in bad shape, after having been battling countless monsters. Soon enough, waves of creatures start to appear, with the Belpease siblings taking on the increasingly bizarre, numerous antagonists (and maybe picking up a few friends along the way).

Writer David Hazan does a great job adapting the bizarre video game to the page, with cheeky nods to the weird place names and a good use of the game’s characters, amongst other things.

Jimmy Kucaj’s art is highly stylized, and he does fantastic work in overrunning pages with tons of monsters, as is the case in the game. There are a few panels where things are a little too chaotic to make out what’s going on, but for the most part the visuals match the energy of the script and the source material in a clear, enjoyable way.

Though Vampire Survivors is one of my favourite games of the last few years, I’ve never once stopped to think about its narrative or lore. The addiction comes from its very Pavlovian unlocking of endlessly chaotic weapons and hordes of silly monsters; yet Hazan and Kucaj have crafted a fun little delve into a surreal world that makes just enough sense to hang a story on.

Hi! I’m Jason, and I write for midlifegamergeek.com, every single day. If you’re interested in supporting original, regularly published, human created content (which has never been plagiarised or otherwise copied from the hard work of other writers), you can donate and help me to keep this site running.

Not only do I earn no income from my writing here (though I may earn small fees from affiliate links posted on my pages; as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases from these links), but it seems that my work has, at times, been stolen and re-used by lazy, morally bankrupt idiots.

There’s no pressure of course, but I’d be truly grateful for any support that you could offer – and it’s easy to do so at either of these links: Ko-Fi.com/geekmid or PayPal.

Any donations are truly appreciated – and I also appreciate you taking the time to read my articles. Remember: this whole article was by Jason Brown, and appeared on midlifegamergeek.com. Take that, Skynet!