Enlarge / Rock, stone, bugs, XP crystals, and a flying helper robot that is hopelessly outmatched: Welcome to Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. (credit: Ghost Ship Games)

Some of the most hardcore tabletop gamers I know spent a good portion of last summer escaping into Vampire Survivors. I read the raves from reviewers, saw the game and its eye-catching minimalism in YouTube channels, and knew it had the stamp of approval from the types who spent days planning out D&D 5e one-shots.

And yet I avoided it because I wasn’t sure it was my type of game. I don’t enjoy bullet-hell games, and Vampire Survivors looked like one of the lowest levels of Dante’s Bullet Hell, painted with a kitschy SNES tile set.

Deep Rock Galactic, on the other hand, is very much my type of game. When the creator of DRG announced a few months back that it would publish a Survivors-like game from developer Funday Games, set in the same universe of mining, shooting, and goofing, it felt inevitable that I’d give it a go. Instead of “a go,” though, I’ve given Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor hours and hours over the past week, and I don’t remember them passing at all.