Renfield isn’t a good movie. Nicolas Cage is a joy as the Lord of Death — gasp! — and Nicholas Hoult does sturdy work as Dracula's sensitive familiar working through a crisis of conscience. But they're talented actors adrift in a movie that doesn't deserve them.
That said, Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, which launched last week on Steam, is pretty fun. I didn’t know much about the BYOB going in, so when my run started, I moved my spritely Nicholas Hoult avatar around a top down depiction of New Orleans’ Saint Louis Cemetery — you know, the one with all the mausoleums — and quickly realized that none of the buttons caused Renfield to attack, he just slashed out in whatever direction he was facing every few seconds. Suddenly, a lightbulb went on: “Oh, it’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Vampire Survivors!” The early 💧access game has the gooꦅd fortune of building on the success of that other (wildly popular) vampire-themed title that took gaming by storm last year.
Though the gameplay is extremely similar to last year’s breakout hit, there are some key differences. Instead of trying to stay alive indefinitely, Bring Your Own Blood sets a time limit once you hit a certain point in the level and tasks you with making it past the boss before the clock runs out. If it does, you don’t fail, but you take damage every few seconds until you die or fell the level's big bad. Also unlike Vampire Survivors, each level is broken up into subsections and you choose the path you chart through the level.
The game smartly takes Renfield’s dilemma from the film — whether to continue to be Dracula’s servant and kill innocent people, or to resist his master and escape his codependent relationship — and gamifies it. In the first level, you find a cheerleader stranded in the cemetery. Once you defeat the mob of Los Lobos gangsters, you have the option to rescue the cheerleader or sacrifice her to Dracula. It’s a BioShock-style fork in the road, and you get your health fully replenished right away by making the bad choice or get something nice down the line for making the good choice. Given that Renfield's plot hinges on the title character coming to the point where he has to make this same decision, it's pretty smart to incorporate it into the gameplay.
There are tons of other, small design choices that the team at Mega Cat Studios made to incorporate elements of the film. In Renfield, Nicholas Hoult's minion needs to eat insects to "grow to full power," so BYOB represents experience points as blue bugs crawling around the stage, with other color-coded insects representing power-ups and health pickups. Collect enough rolly pollies and you'll get to choose from a set of three new abilities, each of which takes its name from something in the film, like Snickerdoodle, which shoots out a batch of piping hot cookies in a ring around your character, or Decorative Platter, a ranged attack that boomerangs out from your position. Plenty are named after self-care terms in keeping with the movie's support group framing, like I Deserve Happiness, which reduces your cooldown time, and I Am Grateful which increases projectile speed for some reason.
The game's pretty slight in its current form. In less than three hours, I've finished all the levels it offers and spent as much of the in-game currency as I possibly can. Until it gets an update, I'm likely done playing it. But in those few hours, it gave me significantly more enjoyment than the movie, so on that level, it's an unqualified success.