Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood Reviews

playing this game is like smoking a cigarette to me. ultimately harmful, but, god, i just can't stop. honestly i'm not sure what i see in it. maybe the more apt comparison is that of a toxic relationship, much like that of renfield and dracula in the movie that for some reason spawned this game. did they expect it to be that successful? i'm morbidly fascinated by it. some part of me is fundamentally drawn to Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood in a way i can't describe. i haven't slept well since i first bought this game. something dark awoke in me, i suppose. an enemy is around every corner now. i expect some manner of dracula to appear to me in the night and take my life as softly as the loosing of a relieved sigh in a quiet moment. nothing seems the same anymore. the graphics are also very nice, a bit flashy and incomprehensible, but fun to look at. eye candy that slowly rots before your eyes. the gameplay is shockingly fun once you develop a sick obsession with it all, although a bit undercooked, perhaps because this is an abandoned game based on a movie that flopped. ultimately, Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood is better than i expected. if you could marry a game, i would not choose this one, but perhaps it would be my mistress. i expect it would poison me and steal my fortune. a solid 6/10 overall.

For the first time i na long time I feel like I found a hidden gem. I decided to check this game out after watching the movie, and fully expected to only get a couple plays out of it. To my surprise this has become one of my favorite games in this genre. Ever since I've played Vampire Survivors I've been trying out any game inspired by it I can get my hands on, and Renfield beats 90% of them. The amount of unlocks, the various characters, the lovelly art - I can appriciate the amount of effort that went into this game. It feels like somethign that was made in love, not like some cheap tie in meant to be part of movie marketing. Stages look great, characters have various abilities, and every time you get something new the next thing is right around the corner - new characters, new stages, new weapons, nightmare mode, endless mode etc. There are games that have been in early access for years and have nowhere near the amount of gmeplay variation that Renfield has. Main downside for myself is how you're expected to unlock all the weapons, but unlocking more of them makes it harder to get the build you want, as some weapons are massively better than others. You only get a maximum of 5 banishes during a run and 5 rerolls - if you could get more or if you could disable some of the things you bought in store so they don;t appear as options as all - I would be more eager to buy weapons I don;t expect to be useful and try them out. The endless mode has a very strong start - you need to have a very specific build in order to survive 70+ rounds, but it's quite slow for the first 4 minutes, and then the speed really ramps up and you start zooming through the stages - but getting there takes forever.

Good twin stick shooter that has the same since of humor as the movie. Has some rough edges but a good and challenging time can be had.

movement feels very floaty and not terribly responsive. A lot of visual noise on the screen which lacks clarity, and the projectiles are almost always too small to notice being hit as soon as your build is up and running. Level ups take a few seconds to register, overall its competent but underwhelming compared to other reverse bullet hell games and leads to everything feeling a bit clunky.

i really wish there was auto aim for every weapon... having to position yourself to where your weapons will hit enemies and manually aim honestly kind of ruins it for me, usually bullet heaven games have an auto aim option. the only aiming option this game has is manual, and the default which is positioning your character to where your attack will be able to hit enemies. some weapons do auto aim by default, but i don't feel like using the same setup every single time. also there are too many straight line attacking weapons that are extremely unsatisfying to use. my last gripe is that there isn't a transparency option for weapon attacks so the visual clutter makes dodging projectiles feel impossible at times despite that though i really like the pixel art, and going from room to room, rather than playing on one giant map. each room is 1-2 min long, and the matches average 20 min each time for me, which is much better than 30 min