Vampire Survivors clones! They’re a dime a dozen these days, primarily because poncle created an admittedly very strong template to mimic. This week’s bullet heaven, as the genre has come to be known, is a charming little entry called Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional, a take on the format that imagines a world where your Windows XP running computer’s icons all want to kill you.
In Vampire Survivors, you can play as a range of characters like that old guy with the garlic and literally Alucard from Castlevania. In Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional, however, you are a mouse. The cursor kind, not the squeaking kind. The basic premise is the same, you have to move around a screen filled with increasingly difficult and plentiful enemies, your attacks are emitted around you with various effects, you can level up and improve your stats.
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What tickles me so much about this one is the ways it leans into being a semi-faux-OS roguelike. When booting up a run, you have to double click on all the options you choose, like what difficulty you want to play at, and what you want your starting weapon to be. Those weapons are quite adorable too; one is a fake DVD logo that bounces around the screen hitting enemies as it does so (real ones know). Another is a literal firewall that surrounds you for a spot of protection.
Then there’s the runs themselves. Going across the map you’ll find different icons that again, you have to double click on to activate. One might open up a window that takes a good 20 seconds to load (using a computer really used to suck (it still does, just differently)). You may then get some experience points and coins to spend in the shop later on. But you’re also at a disadvantage, as a portion of your screen is then covered, so an amount of sacrifice is needed to progress. One icon also may produce a plethora of spam windows completely covering the screen, completely limiting your field of view.
The game very much wears its Y2K influences on its sleeve, but there’s clearly a healthy amount of thought that has been put into just how this 2000s computer aesthetic functions too. It is a silly little thing, but I have been thoroughly convinced by its zillenial approach to Vampire Survivors.
There’s no release date other than sometime in Q2 this year, but you can wishlist the game, and try out the demo, right here.
