Artifact Seeker

Genre: Arcade / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Artifact Seeker, sometimes subtitled Resurrection, is a game combining Arcade and Roguelike elements released in 2024 on PC and Nintendo Switch. And let’s go ahead and get it out of the way now: there’s no way we’ll be getting through this review without mentioning the obvious inspiration, Vampire Survivors. This game does much the same “bullet heaven” sorta’ thing, but seems to be aiming for something deeper with far more options.

Simply put: Artifact Seeker absolutely bombards you with stats. Much like Roguelikes like Slay the Spire, individual battles are broken up by a branching-path map, with encounters that range from battles to story segment choices to treasure, and each encounter generally tends to result in one or more upgrades to your stats and skills, with each upgrade potentially affecting one of numerous stats, elemental affinities, or skills. For a certain type of player, this presents a lot of potential for a killer amount of flexibilities in finding synergies and working toward an epic build.

There’s a bit of a catch here though, as the game isn’t great at explaining what everything means, and while you can highlight much of the menu screens to find out more about things, menu navigation using a gamepad is pretty awful here, and some elements seem completely inaccessible using a gamepad. Thankfully you can freely inspect things using the touchscreen in handheld mode, but this leads to another problem – the text and icons in handheld mode are pretty tiny and not very conducive to inspecting these details. It seems like no matter which way you prefer to play this game, it’s not especially well-optimized for Nintendo Switch.

The presentation is good, but nothing extraordinary, making use of 3D visuals with a fairly generic “dark fantasy” theme, though I did like the character artwork in menus. This is backed by an instrumental epic fantasy soundtrack that suits the game well but isn’t especially memorable. All in all, the presentation works, but doesn’t leave a lasting impression.

As for the moment-to-moment gameplay, Artifact Seeker does a good job copying the same sort of gameplay as Vampire Survivors without changing up too much. There’s a dash move and a special attack with a cooldown, but otherwise you’ll mainly be focused on movement to evade enemy attacks and position yourself so your automated attacks are in range of enemies when they’re unleashed. And as happens with these sorts of games, after you’ve become adequately powered-up enough, the entire screen starts getting filled with your magic and projectiles making it a bit of a task to parse out where surviving enemies are in the mess of attacks, though thankfully this never becomes so bad it detracts from the game.

So taking this all back to Vampire Survivors, how does this compare? Well, I do still prefer Vampire Survivors – I think the weapon design in that game is more creative, its $5 price tag is more attractive than this game’s $9 price, and its simple pixel art style is easier to parse than this game’s 3D visuals. Add to this the earlier issues I had with menu navigation and cutting through the tons of information this game throws at you, and… yeah, Vampire Survivors is still the king of this type of game.

That said, Artifact Seeker is still pretty satisfying, and for those who enjoyed Vampire Survivors and are craving something with a bit more depth and arguably longevity, this should be a great fit for you. The action is good, and there’s a ton of options to play around with when you’re in a run and trying to aim for the perfect build. Even if this game doesn’t take the crown, it’s still deserving of a spot at the king’s table.

tl;dr – Artifact Seeker is a game with Arcade and Roguelike elements that’s similar to Vampire Survivors, with a bit of Slay the Spire tossed in for good measure. It’s a great combination that adds depth to the fun “Bullet Heaven” gameplay, though the terrible menu interface and at times unclear information can be frustrating. Still, this is a great addition to this genre that’s definitely worth trying if you’re looking for a new Vampire Survivors-alike.

Grade: B+

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