Soulstone Survivors
M&Ms tend to trigger in me a kind of existential crisis if I have more than a few. A small handful is no problem, but any more than that and I abruptly come face to face with the mechanics of what I'm doing — the sheer artifice of the thing I'm putting into my body. I find myself overcome with a violent repulsion, so strong that I'll end up literally spitting out whatever is in my mouth and, in doing so, briefly swearing off the mere concept of processed food.
Playing — and ultimately washing my hands of — Soulstone Survivors felt very much like this. Not because of anything so simple as in-game quality: the game is a competent, polished entry in the survivors-like genre that Vampire Survivors spawned into existence, one of many that focus on polish and technicolor spectacle.
But one of the things I think is underrated about Vampire Survivors' success is that it's a weird and charming game, filled with secrets and surprises meant to confuse and delight the player — not merely to accelerate the rate at which dopamine enters the body.
Soulstone Survivors is very good at the dopamine. It is also, in a certain sense, very boring. The game offers breadth — skill sets, customization, playable characters galore — and these choices do have meaningful differences. But they all serve exactly one purpose: to explode things and clear fairly simple arenas in a manner that does not vary from run to run.
It would feel disingenuous to give Soulstone Survivors a particularly negative review, because it is a fun game for a time, and it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. And yet I can't recommend it — because I don't think it is good for you.
I am, at heart, a romantic who believes that video games are, at their best, a transformative piece of art. Even the ones focused purely on pleasure can do so nobly, in a way that puts them on the same tier as something like Ocean's Eleven or Jaws: works of entertainment that carry merits outside that simple rubric. Soulstone Survivors is not one of those. It is an M&M.