Some things just tickle your dopamine receptors just right. In the past I’ve avoided bullet hell games, almost certainly because I’ve been absolutely terrible at them. But that changed back when I inadvertently tricked myself into playing 20 Minutes Till Dawn which blew away many of my preconceived notions of the genre. So you can imagine my intrigue when I saw Desktop Survivors 98, a game that’s very much in the same vein but with a…nostalgic twist. I figured it’d be good for a few hours of fun before I moved onto something else but something about it just kept me coming back making this one of the few games in recent memory that I’ve deliberately set out to 100%.
And by gosh I did it.
Many of us will remember the upbeat, kitschy Microsoft Office Assistant Clippy who’d cheerfully hang out in the bottom right hand corner of whatever document you were working on and offer unsolicited advice whenever you triggered one of its inbuilt rules. He was certainly the divisive character with many people loving the idea of a virtual assistant whilst others couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was effectively retired in 2001 when he was disabled by default in Microsoft Office XP but he’s lived on as a 90s cultural touchstone. Desktop Survivors 98 reimagines the concept in Swordy, although instead of helping you format your homework properly he now wants you to unleash untold hell on waves enemies; all from the comfort of your own desktop.
Those of us who came of age on platforms like Windows 98 will remember this game’s aesthetic well, it’s unabashedly corporate focus promulgating throughout the entire audiovisual experience. Whilst Frutiger Aero is seemingly back in vogue, thanks in no small part to the vaporwave music movement, the design language of the generation just prior to that seemingly haven’t seen the same level of revival yet so Desktop Survivor 98’s attempt at recreating it feels fresh in an usual way. Whilst I’d like to lay the blame for the heavy, heavy visual confusion I routinely suffered through when playing the game on the bullet hell mechanics really it’s also due to the lack of visual variety that this art style requires. The colour palettes of this time were not very diverse with it typically being 16 bits (65K colours, compared to 16+ million today) with only later editions (just prior to Windows XP) fully supporting 32 bit colour depth.
Desktop Survivors 98 follows the template that was popularised by Vampire Survivors, flipping the script on traditional bullet hell games and instead making you the one who provides most of the bullets. You start off with a rather paltry weapon that fires slowly, forcing you to dodge and weave enemies until you can kill enough to level yourself up. That movement happens as fast as you can move your mouse though, meaning that technically not surviving a room is always a skill issue. Levelling up though will provide you access to upgrades, new weapons and utilities that will hopefully make your next room a bit easier. You’ll continue opening rooms until you clear all of them before moving to the next level, up to 3 times, before you’ll meet the final endless room. Once you die you’ll be sent back to the desktop where you’ll have the option of spending the gold you accrued during your run. Initially there won’t be a lot of places to spend it but as you progress, specifically when you defeat bosses for the first time, you’ll unlock additional methods of progression. Most of these are incremental improvements, some quality of life, but done right you can eventually unlock some truly unhinged builds that go far beyond what the base weapons are capable of achieving on their own.
The game’s opening hours do feel like a bit of a slog as you’ll have a limited upgrade pool, none of the base survivability upgrades and will just generally not have a great sense of what works well for your build. This is where you’ll be relying heavily on your ability to dodge and weave past enemies something which I routinely struggled with. For me it was just losing track of the cursor, something which is not unique to Desktop Survivors 98, which would inevitably end up with me taking damage. There were also some upgrades that I found made it harder to judge where the cursor was exactly, often leading me to a false belief that I was safe when I was anything but. Knowing that though I started to favour a certain kind of build which took a lot of those weaknesses away and let me instead focus on testing out other builds.
It’s at this point that you’ll have your favourite weapons, your crutches that you need for a good run and a small bit of latitude to experiment to keep things feeling fresh. The game offers up different biomes once you’ve completed a certain number of rooms in the latest one you’ve unlocked but, honestly, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to play them once the boss has been beaten and the next one unlocked. This was because all the levels were, seemingly, adjusted to your…”power level” but the rewards stayed the same. So just going to Grove and bashing out as many rooms as you could seemed to be the best way to farm gold to get more upgrades whilst also spending them wherever you felt you’d get the best value out of them.
I’m going to tag the next sections as spoilers just because there are some mechanics which, I feel, are meant to be discovered organically as part of the game. If you’ve come here to find a broken build, and don’t mind the spoilers, then read on. Otherwise I’d recommend going in blind as once you figure a few things out the game rapidly becomes a much different beast and it was that transition that kept me playing until I 100% it.
SPOILERS BELOW
So the real game starts once you unlock/discover your first weapon corruption. For me it was the combination of Dr. Watson and Firewall, which gave me that perimeter which slowed and damaged enemies at the same time. This made it so, so much easier to survive the numerous levels that had endless enemies running at you as fast as they possibly could, something I simply couldn’t deal with for extended periods of time. So that became my crutch for numerous runs, keeping me mostly topped up with health whilst also ensuring I wasn’t randomly bumping into enemies. After many runs with that as the base I started looking for other fun corruptions and whilst a few were cool, like the lightning one or the WAV upgrade nothing, and I mean nothing, comes close to my all time favourite:
Flower Box/Pipes with upgraded Floppy Disk.
For those that don’t know the glory that is the Flower Box corruption please cast your eyes to the screenshot below. This thing effectively traces a massive X across the entire screen, clearing anything out in its path. The key to making this truly unhinged though is increasing the number of projectiles as much as you can, which is where Floppy Disk comes in. Max that out in the shop to get 2 additional projectiles and then get another 2 more from the in-run upgrade. If you can get an injection that adds another one, go for it, but almost any upgrade will worth with it. From there you can build out whatever other weapons you want but most things will die offscreen before they ever reach you.
One thing I’ll recommend against though is injecting it with anything that causes an explosion, either on kill or chance on hit. Not that it’s not effective, it’s truly probably the most dangerous thing in the game by far, but every explosion shakes the screen. When that’s happening constantly it means the whole screen is just shaking nonstop and it’s not something you can look at for more than a couple seconds before hurting your eyes. I do appreciate games that allow you to create your own hell like this and the above screenshot is a testament to that.
The last tip I can leave you with is that, once you’ve got a handle on the corruptions, any combination of 4 of them (that’s about the max you can do) will likely be a viable build. I was able to unlock the last 5 or so in about 3 runs without issue, 2 of them without needing to resort to my broken Flower Box build. One of them even got close to rivalling it although none could reach my milestone of killing 100K enemies in one run that I hit, and then proceeded to immediately one up with 200K+ in one run, with the Flower Box build. This gave me more gold than I could reasonably spend and so I was able to unlock basically everything. Truly unhinged.
SPOILERS OVER
Desktop Survivors 98 is a non-stop dopamine delivery machine, perfectly crafted to keep you coming back until it’s had enough of you. I had no idea when I first sat down to play it that I’d stick with it for as long as I did, even less so that I’d get it to 100% in a very reasonable timeframe. This game has a very specific niche appeal, so it’s not going to be for everyone, but for that intersection of bulletstorm enjoyers and elder millennials loving the riff on late 90s aesthetic there’s really nothing else out there. I’m thankfully clean of it now as my ears and eyes really couldn’t take much more of those little hell worlds I kept creating.
Rating: 9.0/10
Desktop Survivors 98 is available on PC right now for $7.50. Total playtime was 15.7 hours with 100% of the achievements unlocked.
