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veebs-hates-video-games · 2 months

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Two more this time that kind of make a matched set: 20 Minutes Till Dawn and Twilight Survivors, which are both very inspired by Vampire Survivors but went in different directions with it, one of them successfully and the other not so much so (yet?).

20 Minutes Till Dawn is the good one. Let's get that out of the way up front. Its influences are obvious, but it has a lot of its own ideas that make it feel distinctly like its own thing, and mostly in ways that are just different, not better or worse. Twilight Survivors doesn't have a lot of original ideas, and large chunks of it come across as "what if we did the same thing as that other game but not as well?"

The extremely limited color palette in 20MTD is used to great effect, particularly with the character portraits, but it really sets a particular mood in the gameplay too. It does make some things a little hard to distinguish sometimes, especially on the Switch's screen, but overall it's great. TS is much more colorful, mostly in a pleasing way, but I actually have a bigger problem with stuff getting lost in the visual noise in that one, and barely legible tiny icons are a bigger offender in that one too because they more frequently appear with no other description next to them even in important places.

Both games actually have manual aiming. This actually works fairly well in 20MTD because it also has a manual attack button. There's also a button to toggle auto-aim whenever you want, which is nice and suits some weapons better than others. Meanwhile manual aiming just feels bad in TS because too many weapons have frustratingly long cooldowns and no indication of when they're about to fire, so you just have to wave it in a direction and hope for the best. You can unlock auto-aim later, but it takes up an entire upgrade slot and has a damage penalty, which is just silly because it makes the game feel much better to play to use it. I am strongly of the opinion that manual aiming works best with either fully manual attacking or quick-firing weapons, but not slow auto-attacking weapons like TS is full of.

Almost every character and weapon in 20MTD feels unique and plays differently and is interesting to build around, and I've finished runs with just about all of them (not every combination, just one or more with each character and one or more with each weapon) that all turned out differently. Different playstyles require entirely different upgrades, and nothing in particular feels mandatory to take on every run as long as you have enough defense/healing for your skill level of (not) getting hit and enough damage to actually kill stuff fast enough, and there are plenty of ways to achieve each of those things.

Most of the characters I managed to unlock in TS and bothered to try felt kind of bad to play. Melee seems particularly like garbage from my few attempts at it, and most melee/short range weapons seem to have terrible damage and mostly be for support, and unless you're the durian you don't end up tanky enough to stand up to bosses anyway. A 15 minute run with a ten minute boss fight at the end does not feel awesome when I can go full glass cannon projectile spam and do it in like 18 seconds instead without having to stand close enough to anything to take any damage in the first place. It also feels exceptionally biased toward cooldown reduction being the most important stat, and with some other really useful passives being the upgrade material for character-specific weapons I kept feeling like I had to choose between my build being unplayable because I didn't have mandatory upgrades or my build being mediocre/not fun because I couldn't upgrade all my weapons because I had to sacrifice a couple slots to meet bare minimums.

Weapons and skills and upgrades also feel more impactful in 20MTD. There's still some room for improvement, but most things feel satisfying to use, and it's pretty easy to see the visual effect of a lot of the upgrades and the impact on enemies. TS is just kind of...mushy? The upgraded versions of weapons are a lot better, but that's not saying much because the base versions of a lot of them are incredibly meh. And even with a few of the upgraded ones I've had runs where I forgot I had a particular weapon because it just gets lost in the visual noise (looking at you, totally-not-the-Runetracer/NO FUTURE). It just needs some kind of something or other to make the attacks hitting enemies not feel like nothing is happening.

Basically go play 20 Minutes Till Dawn if you want a little bit of a different take on the bullet heaven genre that's done pretty well. I got a little burned out like halfway through the difficulty tiers because I was having a hard time coming up with new build ideas to try that actually worked at all, but up until that point I had a lot of fun. And probably wait to see if the planned updates for Twilight Survivors make it feel better to play and balance stuff out a bit better, Or if you've always wanted to be a durian. It has some potential, but it's not there yet and may or may not ever get there.

#20 minutes till dawn #twilight survivors

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