Vain Ascendance
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Vain Ascendance is an award-winning fast-paced roguelite platformer game where you play as Valerie Malbec, a vain, fashionable vampire who is trying to steal a cure for her sunlight sensitivity. Each morning, she infiltrates an ever-changing office building in a race against time to try to achieve her goal.
Use Valerie's stylish dash attack to steal blood from enemies, and either drink it to heal or save it to make Valerie blood cocktails to improve her abilities.
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Winner of the INT D 450 Game of the Year award
Gameplay
Experience three unique areas of the tower as you climb your way up. The rooms you see each run will be randomized, so don't get too comfortable! Use Valerie's fantastic mobility to move around the platforming levels and find your way to the exit or defeat all the enemies to make your way up through the tower. Watch out for the various enemies that try to bar your way, and don't forget to save your blood for some cocktails when you clear an area!
Controls
The default controls for the game. Can be rebinded through the options menu.
| Keyboard | Controller (PS4, others supported) | |
| Movement | Arrow Keys | DPad |
| Jump | X | Cross |
| Dash | C | Square |
| Drink | Z | Circle |
| Pause | Enter/Escape | Options |
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Comments
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Solid experience overall! Interesting movement system, fun boss fights, and a vampire waifu, what more can you ask for? Here's my playthrough for anyone interested:
Not much feedback I can give other than a few obvious suggestions if there's still interest to add more content:
For example, expanding the rouge-lite elements would be great for replayability, such as adding additional playable characters and/or more types of dash techniques for completely different kinds of playstyles. Of course, adding more stages and separate routes with more boss fights will add even more variety.
If there's any desire to expand the narrative a little, it would also be cool to see a few different outcomes depending on how you play the game (i.e. how fast you complete the game). Oh, and some CG art to accompany the endings would be great too, but not necessary (all I'm saying is that Valerie in a swimsuit would probably do wonders for marketing).
Anyways, I had a good time, I'll be looking forward to anything else that the team creates in the future!
Incredibly fun game! It can be pretty challenging but I felt like I was getting better and better each run. (For the most part lol) I like the way the capriblood was incorporated. On one hand you need them to survive and restore health but on the other, saving them up can help upgrade your character faster. It adds some good decision making to the player’s resources.
I do think the movement and controls could use a bit more tightening up. I like that I can use a dash then dash into another direction. I also like that I can dash once more if I dash through an enemy. This adds a lot of quick-reflex strategy that helps flesh out the movement based combat. Sometimes however, I always felt like I should be able to cancel out of a dash quickly into a jump or another dash. Not saying this is how the game should work but it did give me that desire of wanting those mechanics in some capacity to help smooth out moving around. This combined with some awkward enemy and hazard placements as well as some awkward geometry in some parts can cause needless damage or even deaths, which can make for a frustrating experience.
I also used a PS4 controller, but was kind of surprised I wasn’t able to use the control stick to move around. Was there a reason for this? (Or did I miss something in the settings? Or perhaps it’s still in development and I’m just impatient! lol)
Overall, this was an incredibly fun time! As of the writing of this comment, (and creation of the video below) I only made it to area 2-3, but I’m definitely going to try and beat this on my own! Great work!
Thank you for playing our game, glad you're having a good time!
If it helps, you can jump cancel out of a dash (as well as out of damage), just jump near the end of a dash to achieve this!
Thanks for the tip! Managed to complete the game, it was a great time!
Fun game! Pretty hard sometimes. It's fair enough to the point where I think it's feasible to beat with no upgrades.
The omnidirectional movement system is great, very fast paced. It's fun to take out the enemies in rapid succession.
The hazards can be hard to avoid at times (or I could be bad), but the blood-to-heal system balances it out. As such, going as fast as possible is a very viable playstyle. The room randomization was nice.
The sprite work is nice, as is the music. It's a pretty funny game despite the mass blood harvesting, and there are some nice references too.
Liked it a lot.
thank you for playing our game!! glad you had a good time :)