I’m gotta admit: I love vampires. Not as a friendly neighbor who drinks ethically sourced blood but as an evil monster who hunts for humans’ blood and turns into bat/fog/wolf at will.

(If you don’t want to read about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, skip to the next section.)

My first experience with vampire as a playable character in a roguelike was Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Vampire in DCSS was interesting if a little bit weird: the removal of hunger from the game made the devs change the way Vampire’s gimmick works causing its own issues (why would I ever change to the inferior Bloodless form?) while another species, Vine Stalker, excel at the rapid healing in melee much more than the archetypal bloodsuckers.

Nonetheless, I loved playing Vampires. Despite everything, they were species with no equipment restrictions and no stat penalties. While being primarily focused on stabbing, they were also really at swordfighting and several magical schools (Necromancy, Hexes, Ice magic) making them a good choice for hybrids.

Now, objectively speaking, the species that replaced Vampires, Poltergeists, are much better designed: them gaining a boost to defense for every status effect they inflict on an enemy creates so many useful and unique synergies making normally ‘decent’ spells like Cause Fear truly shine, while the ability to “haunt” (= equip) multiple gloves/boots/hats is just hilarious while also pleasantly different from the way other species go about their armor.

Despite this, I didn’t play Poltergeists nearly as much as Vampires back when they still existed. It might be that I just dislike that Poltergeist has a health penalty and is generally less tanky compared to Vampires, and that I stopped playing stabbers as I became a better player (stabbers’ endgame sucks) but I believe the species’ flavor plays a big role here too. I just don’t care about ghosts that much.

So, do I miss being able to play as Vampires? Nah. Because…

Golden Krone Hotel. A roguelike that fixed so, so many problems I have with the genre. Runs taking hours to win. Boring, uninspired hunger systems. Lack of control over my character’s development (this targets one game in particular). Extremely inconvenient saving system (again, one game). Awful UI from hell (old roguelikes).

The game is centered on a journey of a human afflicted with vampirism whose goal is to reach the top floor of the hotel and to beat the shit out of its’ owner. Who’s the human we’re playing as, the owner of the hotel and the relations between humans and vampires in this world - all these questions are answered in lore bits here and there, sometimes told through dialogues. Yes, you heard me right, a traditional roguelike with dialogues!

You need to ascend ten floors - but it doesn’t mean that the game is just 10 floor and nothing as GKH borrows a concept of branches and runes from DCSS. And just like in DCSS, to get to the final area, you need to explore optional branches and gather at least three MacGuffins there, represented as rings. In defiance to Crawl, rings do give you mechanical bonuses increasing your stats and/or granting you resistances.

Vampirism in this game is a force to reckon with:

• As a human, you can use magic and weapons, regain health over time but you have to deal with hunger and vampirism that slowly gets you. The only way to become a human after turning vampire is to drink a soul elixir.
• As a vampire, you are naturally strong but cannot use weapons, you cannot use magic but can learn vampiric powers by drinking demons’ blood, you lose health naturally but you can heal up by drinking blood of the living. You don’t need normal food but you take damage from sunlight (which is a whole mechanic on its own!) and water, and you are weak to fire.

In addition to that, human and vampire NPCs recognize you and will attack you only if you aren’t the same as them meaning the game has a two set of enemies that will attack at different times.

As usual for the genre, melee brutes are easiest to play. Vampiric form gives you more strength and blood spills around you victim so you can easily heal up during fight. Mages and rangers aren’t so lucky as vampires can’t use spells and the pistol leading to more resource management: now you need to assess you mana/bullets, food and soul elixirs! Despite this, Sage and Warper are two best classes in the game.

GKH improves on a lot of pain points of the genre:

• UI and controls are top-notch. Going from “I don’t know anything about this game” to “I can do anything in a matter of seconds” takes like a minute or less. You can play with a controller. Fancy features like animations and the like can be disabled. It is very nice.
• Visual style is pretty good. I never had a problem distinguishing between two similar but different enemy types. The entire Line of Sight is visible at all times and UI doesn’t cover parts of it. The map takes a bit of time to familiar yourself with… but that’s like the only problem.
• Resource management is involved and interesting. It’s not just braindead “press ‘e’ to eat when the bar is low”. If you notice you struggle with food, you go Vampire. For mages, that’s a big drawback and it might force you into another playstyle if you’re particularly unlucky. Human-only challenge run is very heavy on resource management.
• Item identification is the best I’ve seen in the whole genre. The developer has a blog post about it that I really recommend to read if you’re interested.
• The way floors increase in size as you go further. The floor 1 is a tiny level with a few rooms. The floor 9 is a huge level filled with very dangerous enemies of all types. Later levels are so big that I sometimes just don’t clear them completely. And that’s cool, I like it!
• Roguelite-inspired run length. In a community that considers DCSS to be a short game GKH’s runs taking under an hour from start to finish is a godsend.

Of course, the game isn’t perfect and I have some issues with it. Classes aren’t that different from each other. Some branches are too gimmicky for my liking. Plenty of questionable spells. Sunlight mechanic makes being a vampire a bit annoying. In general, the game isn’t as large and complex as I wanted it to be. But that’s fine. It has its’ own niche and it fits that niche so well!