One of V Rising’s greatest strengths is how well it ties its gothic horror theme to its survival/crafting game. It feels like the fantasy of being a vampire was just as important to the developers as the resource-gathering and base-building fantasy. Those ideals don’t seem like they would fit well together, but they do. Stunlock Studios is bringing a lot of innovative ideas to the survival/crafting genre, and there’s no better example of that than sunlight mechanic – a common vampire trope that fits perfectly in a survival game. Sunlight has a huge impact on how you play the game. It determines when and where you can go, it affects the difficulty of combat encounters, and overcoming it speaks to both your mastery of the game and your character’s progression. It’s a clever mechanic that I appreciate a lot, conceptually. In practice, however, I’ve quickly grown to resent the sunlight and the hindrances it creates. It’s a good mechanic, but after a while it stops being a fun one.
