The Scale

The Monstergirl Scale

For determining if a game is like Vampire Survivors

-1 to 1 in 60 categories

Genre

1. Rogue-Lite 2. Auto-Shooter / Auto-Battler 3. Real Time 4. Top-Down or Isometric 5. Direct Control of Single Avatar Camera Usually Centered on Player 6. Arcade Style (Little Plot) 7. Bullet Heaven A Many Player Shots 8. Bullet Heaven B Few Enemy Shots / Damage on Touch Focus

Simple Movement Focused Controls

9. One Handed Play (With Controller) 10. Move Only 11. No Dash / Dodge 12. No Trigger 13. No Special Move Button 14. No Aiming 15. No On Attack / On Aim Movement Penalty

Survival Game Modes

16. Timed Survival / Boss Mode 17. Endless Mode 18. Unannounced & Organic Waves 19. High Enemy Count / "Horde"

Power Progression

20. Level on XP Gain Run Event 21. Streamlined Level Choices 22. Currency Based Meta Unlocks 23. Goal Based / Find Based Meta Unlocks

Depth of Buildcrafting

24. Build Crafting 25. Impactful Level / Item Options 26. Weapon Combination / Evolution 27. Interesting Weapon, Item & Ability Synergy 28. Invincible / Broken Builds Possible

Map / Level Features

29. Explorable Map 30. BIG Maps 31. XP / Currency on Ground 32. Health on Ground 33. Temp Powerups / Items on Ground 34. Treasure Chests / Loot Events 35. Vendors on Map / Run

Depth and Breadth of Content

36. Enemy Variety 37. Elites & Bosses 38. Many and /or Interesting Characters 39. Many Challenges 40. Multiple Stages 41. Difficulty Modifiers 42. Bestiary / Lore 43. Achievements 44. Secrets

Aesthetics

45. Retro / Pixel Art Style 46. Damage Numbers 47. Lo-Fi Charm 48. Bumpin' Music 49. Unique / Fun Names / Writing 50. Subtle Humor

Gameplay Vibe Check

51. Panic & Zen Duo Vibe 52. Over The Top 53. "One More Run" / Short Runs 54. Difficulty Ramp 55. Fun Ramp 56. Low Price 57. Technical Check / Functional Polish 58. Controls Check 59. Fun Check 60. Feels like VS

How to Tally

-1 to 1 in 60 Categories
Scoring in 10ths
(example: -.4 or .8)

1: Feature Fully Present
0: Feature Missing
-1: Critical Difference

Tip:

Rely Heavily on Vibes!

Report as number out of 60,
Or Convert into 10 Point Score.

The scale "assumes you're
ranking a very "similar game.
In theory a final score can be negative.

See Definitions for a full explanation of every category on the similarity and review scales. See scoring guide for detailed examples.

Comparison Scale Examples:

Vampire Survivors

10.0 | 60

Halls of Torment

9.0 | 53.9

Chess Survivors

8.0 | 48.0

20 Minutes Till Dawn

6.8 | 40.8

Risk of Rain

5.1 | 30.7

Hades

4.4 | 26.3

Returnal

3.2 | 19.4

Rogue

1.0 | 6.1

Elden Ring

-1.9 | -11.3

Call of Duty 2

-3.8 | -22.9

Fun at Home!

Score games yourself with The Scorecard!

Argue about it on the playground!

Thanks & Links

Thanks, Links and Further Reading

TY everyone at r/survivorslikes & the discord!

HUGE thanks to the over 40 developers who have already contributed surveys and let me interview them for this project! I haven't listed you individually here but all your games and useful comments are in the table of course!

I did a lot of research for this and much of it is ongoing! This section has some thanks, links and various folks that inspired me!

"Scraping takes all the fun out of making a spreadsheet!"
- Oscar Wilde, probably

Nothing on this sheet was scraped! Hand typed, grass fed, organic, error prone data baby!

Thanks to everyone who reviews games on steam, when I'm done I'm gonna put my reviews there too. I learn so much about what to purchase from you folks and you sometimes have damn good analysis missing in some mainstream reviews.

Huge thanks to people who write steam guides, post youtube videos of builds using the keywords 'broken' or 'invincible', post 15 hour longplays of half hour run roguelikes, write gamefaqs and use table formatting in their reddit replies. i see you. i love you. I flip through like 40 for every game and only just started thinking of keeping track. It's a little hard to credit everyone as I made the initial 500 game list and researched games to play myself before the project, but I'm doing my best below.

Less thanks to youtubers who use keywords like 'broken', 'busted', 'overpowered' and 'invincible' about builds that are not and aren't even outside the normal range. Just winning doesn't mean it's 'broken'! You need to be able to put the controller down and literally walk away and keep winning. That's the goal.

Definitely no-thanks to all the scammy websites on google that seem to scrape content off forums and reddit without credit, then mess it up anyway when they spit it back out.

Press

Some press has mentioned this project or the r/survivorslikes sub, thanks for the shout out!
- The Meditative Chaos of 'Survivors-like' Games

Special Thanks

Spreadsheet Commenters / Submitters: Every dev of course, the survey responses and casual interviews have been super useful. Silver721, OneUpNerd, Genki who left public comments or filled scorecards.

Every dev who launches their game with full controller support for my poor Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome hands that can't play with a mouse anymore. Every dev that intentionally thinks of the disabled community when they add one joystick / one button play. My partner for putting up with me using the TV in 2 minute increments then staring at spreadsheets for 20 minutes. Weed. My various neuro-atypical diagnoses.

Links and Threads

We've gathered a ton of links to other lists discussing the genre. This is useful both to find games we missed, to help grow other communities, and to track the history of the terms! It shows a pretty clear broad usage of 'survivors' terms ('survivor games', 'survivor-like', 'games like vampire survivors') as well as the popularity of 'bullet heaven'!

r/VampireSurvivors, r/RogueLikes, r/RogueLites, r/Shmups and all the other hyper-nerds of reddit. Practically only way you can find good info these days is by appending 'site:reddit.com' to any google search.

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on my first reddit post sharing the spreadsheet results. And feedback in this thread on r/pcgaming.

Thanks to these links, which I found partially through my progress and were really helpful for adding more to the list
- "Just some Vampire Survivor like games I think people should know about"
- "Other games like vampire survivors you recommend?"
- Folks who responded on one of my older posts
- "Bullet heaven/Vampire survivors games should only have auto aim" discussion
- Discussion on best of survivorslikes humble bundle related post

I looked through hundreds of posts about this on Reddit (the frequency was an inspiration for making the sheet) but those are a couple of the most helpful. I started noting frequency of suggestion at one point to figure out what to rank first, but only part way through.

Holy shit, I found this one so late in my search, but Baboy's got like 400 tracked in the Bullet Heaven Fandom on steam list, was able to get at like ~200 unknown ones off here, lots more added to the upcoming section (and my wishlist so hopefully I'll find out when that status changes).

Found pretty late, another spreadsheet where someone was collecting bullet heavens, unfortunately the only new one I found on this list of about 40 titles was Razerwire: Nanowars:

After I'd finished my scale I saw this great presentation by Scott Burger at the Roguelike Celebration 2023 where he looked at steam datasets by pulling a large amount of data, there's a blog post about it here! The Data Science of Roguelikes. I don't trust steam tags or scraping for this project so I didn't pull anything from this but I'm eager to delve into it.

I found a list of 40 games on Mobygames that has a similar and good definition of Horde Survival as the name of the genre. I was able add 1 more game (universe treasure) from there.

Article linked in the above is interesting: A genre is born: Horde games

Found another curated / review list on stream called Impressive Rogue Games

It looks like u/TyrianMollusk also posts lists of upcoming games in the rogue-lite tag in the r/rogueish subreddit. Example here!

So if you're looking for non wave survival rogue-lites check it out. Looks like they're scraped from the tag which I already get on steam, so didn't find anything new in the latest one unfortunately, but will try to keep an eye on them. I don't publish anything direct from scraping so it's likely those updates will be a little quicker too. Obviously you won't find the non rogue-ish wave shooter games, like the arcade ones we're tracking, but I'll keep trying to get them in as soon as I can.

kongooie linked in the discord a list of bullet-heaven games on glitchwave.com.

Creators / Posters

I started attempting to just note the names of every creator whose content I looked at, even a little bit. No particular order. I already missed a lot and this is likely out of date but thanks for putting it out there!

Note: I know nothing about these people aside from the fact I landed on their content at some point. I'm not endorsing anyone, if any of these folks are bad folks feel free to let me know!

Steam Guide Writers and Game Reviewers

Baboy1337 (Bullet Heaven Fandom Founder), Bingle, Crazyfaith, VanAlphen

Reddit Posters, Discord Users

(below from public comments on old threads mostly! thanks to everyone who chatted with me!)

Darkly1977, Free_Knee6826, Rekziboy, ImpressivePercentage, TheDunkarooni, Lifeorlevel, Anjinash, Acorn-Acorn, equinoxaeonian, anjinash, averagereviewguy, OneUpNerd, drowsyau

YouTube Creators

JRSBetaTests, CG Plays, GainsForm, BarbecueSOS, TigerClawTV, LGR Blerbs, Sifd, Slickdeviant, TotalBiscuit, Tenkiei, Mr. E, WooBou, Sifd, CasualBenGaming, Sinvicta, Splattercatgaming, MzehnMzehn, rickOshay, Pink Alpaca Plays, TomVsEverything, TimeToGrind, aelian, Kosh Gaming, Cold Beam Games, Local Gaming Channel, MAZAVS, OHRye, Ghostbear Gaming, SirKillerBubba, Gaming Survivors, World of Ilo, Leila Gharani

Publications, Websites

GameFAQs, Racketboy, Kotaku, IGN, Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Roguelike.club, Polygon, GamingOnLinux, TheGamer (though I got issues with your ads and SEO tactics), IndieDB, Defold

FAQ & Guide Authors

Michael C. Toy (Rogue 1985 official Guide to the Dungeons of Doom), Sam Kaplan, Harry Alston

Other Academics, Writers, Bloggers, Social Media, Etc.

Tony Carnevale, Noah Swartz, Kirk Hamilton, anewson, Christopher Padilla, Peter Howell

Everyone who presented at Roguelike Celebration 2023, which was a really cool conference: Scott Burger, Aaron A. Reed, Nic Tringali, Linas Gabrielaitis, Ludipe, Florence Smith Nicholls, Kes, Mike Cook, Scott Burger, Nat Alison, Eric Billingsley, Elliot Trinidad, Paul Hembree, Jurie Horneman (especially Scott Burger seeming to do very similar genre research!)

Mark Johnson, Jesse Collet, Keni, Leigh Alexander Ray, Crashtroid, Everest Pipkin, JEff Olson, Dustin Freeman, Jonathan Lessard, Tom Francis, Patrick Kemp, Stav Hinenzon, Josh Galecki, Jasper Cole, Brianna McHorse, Chris Foster all presented on the second day of Roguelike Celebration 2023!

Other Reading

Just gonna add links and books and other things that seem cool on the same topic:

Exploring Roguelike Games by John Harris

The Door Problem - Liz England

Why So Few Violent Games (just good haha)

Permaconsequence and Permadeath

Vampire Survivors: How developers used gambling psychology to create a Bafta-winning game - The Conversation

A Surprisingly Simple, Yet Addictive New Game Genre

Steam Interactive Recommender (official recommendation tool you can filter by a wide variety of angles and they don't seem to tell you about anywhere)