DEAD AGAIN

Vampire Survivors popularised the "stand in a crowd of enemies and don't die" genre, but DEAD AGAIN — a js13k 2022 entry from Jonas Olmstead and Jesper Rasmussen — plays closer to a classic top-down survival horror shooter than an auto-battler. You aim and fire manually, ammo is scarce and weapon-specific, and you can only carry one gun at a time, so a shotgun found in one room might mean abandoning the pistol that's kept you alive so far. The zombies, vampires and ghosts get stronger the longer you survive, and the game is explicit that you are not meant to "win" it so much as see how long you last before the title screen's promise comes true.

A real second control scheme, not a token one

The detail worth leading with is what the developers' own README calls out separately for desktop and mobile, because it's rare for a jam entry to actually deliver on both halves of that promise. Desktop uses WASD or arrow keys to move, the mouse to aim and fire, and R or Space to reload. Mobile uses a left virtual joystick to move (releasing it reloads) and a right virtual joystick to aim, firing when you let go — a genuine "draw and release" mechanic rather than a tap-to-shoot compromise. Testing drove both independently: on the phone profile, a real touchscreen drag on the left stick visibly moved the camera and character, and a real drag-and-release on the right stick turned the player to face the aimed direction and appears to have fired (an ammo icon in the HUD row changed from bright to spent-looking immediately after). On desktop, pressing W repeatedly moved the character toward the top wall of the starting room, revealing previously-offscreen tiles below exactly as a camera-follow shooter should, and a mouse click aimed and fired the weapon in the clicked direction. Neither control scheme felt like a fallback for the other, which is precisely the bar this shelf holds every game to.

Enemies that spread out without real pathfinding

Reading the source turns up a genuinely neat trick behind what looks like competent enemy behaviour: there's no pathfinding in the conventional sense. Instead, a system of soft "force fields" nudges every enemy slightly away from other enemies (so packs spread out rather than stacking on one tile) and away from solid tiles like walls and gravestones (so they naturally route around obstacles), while the player leaves a trail of "attractive footprints" that pulls enemies toward doorways and choke points the player has already passed through. It's a cheap, clever substitute for real navigation, and in an 8-second idle observation window during testing it produced a zombie that found its way to open ground without ever getting stuck on scenery.

Presentation, and the one real complaint

The pixel art (built on the LittleJS engine) is confident and readable in isolation — sprites are built from a single mirrored frame each, a trick the developers document themselves — but the whole screen sits under a heavy dark-red vignette tied to the game's line-of-sight and shadow system, and it genuinely reduces how far you can comfortably read the screen. This isn't just a subjective note: one of js13k's own 2022 judges raised precisely this complaint ("the whole view can go dark because you..."), and testing confirmed distant tiles and enemies are frequently hard to distinguish from the background. It's clearly a deliberate atmospheric choice rather than a bug, and it does suit the horror theme, but it comes at a real cost to clarity that keeps this from scoring higher on visuals.

One structural honesty note: the GitHub repository linked from the js13k listing ships only uncompiled source files and a Grunt/UglifyJS/Roadroller build chain with no committed output, so cloning it does not produce a playable game. This review is built from the competition's own frozen copy at play.js13kgames.com, which is the actual submission that was judged and is functionally identical to what a built copy of the repository would produce.

Final verdict

DEAD AGAIN backs up its "works on mobile" claim with real, independently-tested evidence rather than a hopeful README line, and the resource-scarce shooting loop underneath is tense enough to justify more than one attempt. What holds it to a 7.5 is the visibility the game's own atmosphere works against, and a map pool that reveals its three-layout budget faster than the escalating threat does. Both are honest trade-offs of a 13-kilobyte budget rather than carelessness, and neither stops this from being a legitimately well-built shooter on whatever device you play it on.