Vampire Survivors but with ACTUAL rogue-like and roleplaying | Demo Review - Artifact Seeker

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✨Overview

Artifact Seeker presents itself as a promising 3D Roguelike Survivor RPG game with bullet hell arena elements. Having recently released its demo on January 14, the game offers players a taste of what's to come, featuring two playable characters and the initial two chapters. The full game is just slated as ‘Coming Soon’ on Steam with no clear date yet.

⭐️Demo Score: 8/10

📖Story and Premise As of the demo, the story and premise aren't extensively explored, but the game takes place in a world called Aurorium where darkness has consumed everything. This ensuring chaos is merely a game for the gods, and a band of small mortals has attempted to obtain powerful artifacts to help them defeat the darkness and, quite possibly, ascend to godhood themselves. 🎨Visuals and Art Artifact Seeker's visual style is a blend of cel-shaded and comic-book cartoon aesthetics. The 3D models features a somewhat low-fi appearance combined with vibrant and epic looking special effects for the abilities and spells. As for the UI, the menus and general UI design is all over the place. It doesn’t look polished or that pleasing to the eyes, but it’s serviceable for the gameplay intended. 🎮Gameplay

The core gameplay revolves around surviving hordes of monsters using an assortment of powerful attacks and skills. Unlike traditional arena survival roguelikes, Artifact Seeker introduces a combat system reminiscent of Vampire Survivors but with battles segmented into quick, small-sized sessions. The emergent rogue-like progression occurs between these battles, incorporating dynamic events and randomized rewards and choices. Honestly, this segmentation is a pretty welcome change, as it fragments the usually 30-minute or so long-winded runs of Vampire Survivors into much more bearable sessions with quick respites of storytelling and decision-making in between. It kind of disrupts the momentum of combat, especially for those who'd like to just keep fighting, but it keeps the experience fresh and gives players other options to increase their power rather than just endlessly engaging in combat. In-between these arena-style survival battles are the actual rogue-like progression involving a branching tree layout through a series of nodes.These nodes features many various roleplay events and storytelling elements that give players choices in how to handle them. This adds a bit of personal narrative flavor to the game. The outcomes of these encounters can result in either a reward, penalty, or a combination of the two. The rewards comes in many ways; obtaining powerful artifacts, skills to use, and looting gold to buy and sell artifacts and skills. ⚔️Combat and Spells

Combat in Artifact Seeker is dynamic, chaotic, and action-packed, but it only requires players to focus on movement and positioning. Skills and attacks are mostly automated, making it very accessible and non-complex as far as controls go.

Alongside a selection of characters, two of which are playable in the demo, the game allows you to equip up to six skills at a time, each with its unique mechanics and mannerisms. Some are AOE, some spawn randomly, some summon creatures, and some are targeted. These skills accumulate over the course of the game and are primarily obtained during the first few runs. You are at the mercy of RNG when selecting skills, but you can replace any of your six skills whenever you find one that better suits the playstyle you're aiming for You can come up with some crazy powerful builds and synergies in this game, and it guides you through the process, showing what's synergistic with what, and assisting you as much as possible to avoid confusion about potential synergies and combos. Once I figured out my preferred build, it wasn't very difficult to actually acquire the skills I wanted and just have fun mowing down hordes of enemies. Despite the appearance of targeted spells, the targeting can actually be automated for a more movement-only survival experience, similar to Vampire Survivors. However, there are still two abilities that need to be activated manually from time to time and cannot be automated: the dash and the ultimate ability, which is presented in-game in an epic fashion. It is a literal game-changer both in terms of gameplay and visuals. Outside the dash and ultimate, the game is mostly played with minimal control input. There is even a Mouse-only mode that transfers all the controls to the mouse, allowing you to play with just one hand. Controller support is complete with on-screen prompts, although menu navigation is not quite optimal because most of the design elements were clearly built with point-and-clicking in mind. 📊Technical Performance

The overall technical performance of the demo, including graphics and responsiveness, appears solid, providing a smooth gaming experience with a very low hardware requirements. The game, at least the demo, did not lag or crash during my two-chapter playthrough to end the Demo. ⚖️Conclusion Artifact Seeker's demo (Artifact Seeker: Prologue) provides a promising glimpse into a unique bullet-hell survivor game, made fresh by infusing rogue-like and roleplaying elements. While the menus and overall UI design may not be very pleasant to look at, what truly matters is the core gameplay itself, which seems enjoyable and solid enough to capture my attention even in its limited demo and build anticipation for its release, whenever it's ready.

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