Desktop Survivors 98 is an action roguelike that moves at the speed of your mouse, which is to say pretty fast

Desktop Survivors 98 - Official Announcement Trailer - YouTube

I quite like the whole action roguelike genre that built up around games like Binding of Isaac and Nuclear Throne and metamorphosed into a whole new thing with the explosive birth of Vampire Survivors.

It's basically the game you imagined the desktop was when you were younger and more bored and clicking around because this particular computer at school or work or grandma's doesn't have any games on it and it certainly isn't going to survive you trying to install/download/run/browse any.

It is, basically, an oddly adorable combination of Vampire Survivors and Rusty's Retirement. Except it is controlled directly with your mouse and, for that reason, pretty challenging. Like, your little guy moves at mouse speed, right? You dodge at mouse speed, enemies move at a speed to catch your ultra-high-DPI gaming mouse wrist-flicks. It gets kind of hardcore and I kind of love it for that.

I also love it for the many, many references to what operating systems and casual PC games in general were like in the lo-fi days of the mid-to-late '90s. Weird little pixelated dungeon crawlers. Animated assistants. Desktop pets. The good stuff.

You can find Desktop Survivors 98 on Steam for $5.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.

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