Desktop Survivors 98

TheAwakening
5 days ago
3 min read

Introduction

¡Here’s a game powered by your own desktop! Desktop Survivors 98 is a bullet heaven roguelite dungeon crawler where you can play with your desktop wallpaper in the background, or use a custom in-game one.

The game features classic graphics but it takes the modern gameplay of Vampire Survivors. You must defend your cursor against waves of enemies, collecting upgrades and improving your weapons, as you delve deeper into the dungeon.

Gameplay

At the start you must select a cursor, which acts as your player stats (damage, max health, experience and gold gains, etc.) and the starting weapon, then the biome you want to play. The entire game is played with your cursor.

Enemies hover towards the cursor, with some firing projectiles. The weapons fire automatically, but some of those can be interacted with.

Every kill drop experience and gold that must be collected moving the cursor towards them. Leveling up grants a random upgrade with a choice of 3 (4 depending on your Luck stat), a weapon or a passive item. Upgrading a weapon alone will increase its base damage, amount of projectiles fired, cooldown, and/or area of effect.

You must hold on a dungeon room until timer counts down to cero. Once enough rooms are cleared, a set of stairs appears and you can progress further. Specials rooms include a shop with Piper the wizard cat, a Jester Box that can give you a stat upgrade if you win its game, and a boss room. Defeating the boss of the biome dungeon will grant you lots of gold coins and a special upgrade you can inject into a weapon of your choice.

The goal here is to unlock all the unlockable weapons, upgrades, and features of the game.

The shop offers permanent upgrades and weapon boosters, and there are other features to spice things up, particularly at the endgame you can drastically change the whole game by speeding it up, reskin every enemy, or modify certain stats. Last thing to notice is that you can merge weapons into powerful versions (dubbed in Latin), increasing its damage per second to melt mobs in mere milliseconds, a unique mechanic that mimics the idle genre.

Graphics

As you will notice quickly this game is an homage to the first era of personal computers. All of its icons are direct recreations of classic programs, even the pets have the distinct graphic style of the first 3D drawings. The custom cursors are animated versions aswell, but you can turn this off if you wish. Like I’ve pointed before, the game uses your desktop wallpaper, but you can disable it by setting a custom in-game wallpaper (recommended for streaming mode).

Audio

All the sound effects are modern, more fittingly for the game itself. You got two types of music qualities, which will change according to the biome you are playing. Once you unlock a certain feature you can change between the MIDI version (a low-quality beat) for a remixed version of the soundtrack.

Known Issues (As of 06/01/25)

Sometimes picking up the death screen item (blue screen of death) can cause the game to freeze, but you can still interact with the taskbar.

Some projectiles might freeze when a game ends/after defeating a boss. Firing these weapons again should reset their decals.

Additional Notes

I have made a faster progress than in other roguelites, so you should have no issue reaching the 100% completion within a few hours. My advice? Prioritize unlocks, then pick weapons with area of effect, and upgrades that improve your overall damage per second.

You can choose not to pick an upgrade by selecting health restore instead if you do not see what you are looking for.

Once you unlock the shop you can pick anything you want for permanent upgrading your stats, as you can buyback said purchase. I’d pick offensive upgrades over defensive or support, or a mix of offensive and support (pickup range, revives). Definitely buy the amount upgrade first.

Leave the weapon stat upgrades for last, as you will be switching from main weapons very often. And if you want an extra challenge, you can increase the enemy scaling health, damage and speed for more loot.

Remember that you can reach the endgame faster with good luck and RNG.

Rating: 8/10