the most addictive video game i have played in some time (and it's free)

i'm thankful for the simple formal elegance of the game—there are no complicated controls or need for perfect timing or complex strategic decision-making. i'm thankful you view your hero from above in various environments (the first an endless green field interspersed with graveyards and torches) and you can do basically three things in the game. i'm thankful that the first of those three things is you can:

- use the arrow keys or a controller or your finger to move your hero up, down, left, and right, trying to avoid being touched by enemies 

i'm thankful that your weapons are on timers rather than being activated by you. for example, with the first hero you start with, his weapon is a whip and every {n} seconds, the whip shoots out from his right hand side and damages any enemies in its path. because the weapon is on a timer, your goal is to structure your movements such that when your weapon timer ticks on, you are in position to attack one or more enemies.

- kill enemies and collect gems

i'm thankful that the title, vampire survivors, comes from the fact that when you start, you are surrounded by small swarms of vampire bats. your goal is to kill the bats (who will deplete your health and ultimately kill you if they touch you)—when you kill them, they (often) drop gems (blue gems are worth the least, green gems are worth more, red gems are worth a lot) and you can walk over the gems to pick them up. i'm thankful that picking up gems fills a blue bar at the top of the screen. i'm thankful that once you collect enough gems to fill the bar, you level up and a pop-up appears, which engages the third and final thing you can do

- choose new weapons, abilities, or upgrades from the pop-up

the pop-up will include 3 or 4 choices (the game does a lot of small interesting things with randomness and luck) of upgrades—a typical set early in the game might include an upgrade of your whip, such that rather than only striking to the right as it does initially, it strikes to both the right and left at the same time, expanding your ability to protect yourself against enemies; a new weapon like the magic wand (a weak weapon but one that shoots a projectile which automatically homes in on the closest enemy to you, unlike the whip hitting them regardless of where they are in position to you); or an ability (like increased speed of movement for your character, which increases your ability to position yourself to avoid being hurt).

i'm thankful that each time you level up, the amount of gems required to get to the next level increases, meaning that you need to kill ever more enemies. this is possible because as time goes on (the game is timed—each round lasts either until you die or until you stay alive for 30 minutes**), the size of the swarms of the enemies multiple seemingly exponentially until you are surrounded by waves of hordes of literally hundreds of them. it's the closest i've seen a game capture the sense of a massive wave of in a zombie movie.

i'm thankful that these two dynamics create a (for me) completely intoxicating game feedback loop—you kill enemies to level up to kill more enemies (who are stronger) to level up and on and on. each upgrade feels in some way like a "gift" because of the randomness—you won't necessarily get the particular thing you want, but you're always getting stronger and more capable and the randomness forces you to try things that you might not have chosen. with each upgrade, your abilities to defend yourself increase (for example, the level 4 whip now fires up down left and right at the same time doing more damage and the timer frequency is faster) such that by the time you're twenty minutes into a game, your character is an engine of destruction, various interlocking timers triggering your character to emit a panoply of attacks that thin the herd around you and create space for you to move 

i'm thankful for this aspect of the game, all of these various things happening on the screen at once in a kind of musical rhythm, which is one of the most psychedelic video games i've ever played. as you get deeper into a session, there is so much happening on the screen that it feels like a kind of animated sand mandala (i'm thankful that i do not have any processing issues with flashing lights and you should definitely not play this game if you do). i'm thankful that watching it and moving my character around with the arrow keys, in the moments where i don't feel imminently threatened with death, is like very weirdly soothing and meditative and conducive to doing while also trying to do calming breathwork (also a great "podcast game") .

i'm thankful that in the game you always eventually die, which is not a big deal. i'm thankful that when you die, you can start a new game and you'll be in the same place as you were initially (weak, with a single whip that attacks to your right), but that in between lives, you can also spend gold coins (which you collect like the gems) on permanent upgrades for your character or to unlock brand new characters with new weapons and attributes and abilities (i think i've unlocked like 15 at this point). this creates another layer of incentive to keep playing the game (it's not just about how strong can you get in an individual session, but how you subtly strengthen yourself over the course of many sessions).

i'm thankful for experiences where we can rest the thinking worrying mind and try to get, temporarily, to a place of peace and blankness, i'm thankful that weirdly this game about surviving vampires has helped me do that.

* i only tried the new iOS version for a few minutes last night and i'm not sure about how well it works for touch controls but i may also just be really used to doing it with the arrow keys
** the game can be paused