Boneraiser Minions

At first glance, you would be forgiven for looking at Boneraiser Minions as just another Survivors-like. However, it quickly reveals a mechanical depth that puts its peers to shame. It functions less like a knockoff and more like a fully-inspired reinterpretation of the formula, hiding a massive hoard of classes, relics, spells and minions behind its crisp pixel art. The sheer density of content suggests a level of care and architectural polish that belies its simple 8-bit aesthetic. As a result, the gameplay loop remains genuinely addictive, as the amount of choices offered staves off repetitiveness. While the systems are sophisticated, the soul of the game is unapologetically gutter-minded. It is absolutely drenched in puerile jokes and relentless innuendo, but it commits to the bit with such defiant energy that the humour becomes legitimately charming. Backed by a soundtrack that rivals the best chiptune classics, the game manages to be a technical triumph and a total degenerate all at once. It is brilliant, filthy fun.

The game was honestly kind of a hot mess. I’m really not sure why its reviews are so good. Response bias, I guess. It’s a shame, because the idea here — instead of getting weapons, you raise undead minions to fight for you — feels like it should be really good, but… First, while the aesthetic here is actually one I quite like, it’s really, really bad for a game in this genre, where things need to be instantly parseable because you need to react quickly. On some level the dev knows this, since part of the introduction to your base area involves bringing you over to the place where you can adjust the colors so you can actually see wtf is going on. The point at which you’re having to tell players to make graphical changes because the UI is so incomprehensible is the point at which you need to step back and make some different aesthetic choices. And honestly the menu wasn’t even robust enough for me; I constantly was losing my character in the maps, even after putting them in a neon yellow costume to help them stand out. I think sometimes, when people copy ideas from games they like instead of building their own thing from the ground up, they don’t stop to consider that the reason something was being done a certain way wasn’t because no one thought of another option, but because it worked really well the way it was. VS has a weird, ugly, delightfully kitschy windows 98 look, but part of the reason it has that look is because it makes everything on the map immediately comprehensible. Even though VS’s maps were bigger, with more enemies and more going on, I never once had a problem keeping track of everything, because it was intentionally designed to be easy to read. You can of course have a game that’s both very pretty and comprehensible (though tbh I’d argue that VS’s look is an intentional aesthetic consistent with the rest of the game’s tone), but just “improving” the look doesn’t instantly map to an improvement to the game. That’s a real fallacy. The other big problem was the game has no tutorial, no tooltips, and lots of jargon. Almost everything has to be figured out by trial-and-error, including extremely basic things like why there’s two HP bars and how they work. And some of it I honestly still don’t understand. Like, what the ♥♥♥♥ is a “bro”? Why are they called that? What does that even mean? I’m still not sure which enemies were “blessed” or how you could tell. The game tells you absolutely nothing and it’s not clever, it’s annoying. Luckily this doesn’t matter too much because the game is incredibly easy. I never had any idea of what the functional difference in minion types were, what the relative power levels were, or like, what the difference between a “guard” melee attacked and a “slash” melee attacker was, but it was ultimately irrelevant. Within a few runs I had maxed out my character class, meta progression, and added all the additional enemy types, and it didn’t matter at all. The other character classes — and my god, there are WAY too many — theoretically have different strengths and weaknesses, but the game is so easy there’s no need to pay attention to them; you can do whatever for any of them. The point that I gave up on the game was when I attempted the achievement for only selecting the first option from all the minion, buff, and spell options for the entire run and… it didn’t matter. The run wasn’t any more difficult than the runs I was doing on my own. I still blew through it. Even if you make all your choices completely randomly, it doesn’t matter. That’s bonkers. It makes me think, actually, of Dogpile, and just how challenging the “random” challenge in that game was, and how satisfying it was to finally win. One of the issues it turns out is inherent in this premise — and I’m not quite sure how to fix this — is that when you’re not the one attacking, you don’t actually have to do anything. I spent most of my runs standing in one spot waiting for my minions to go kill everything; intermittently, I’d run to open a chest that had spawned. That was it. Once I realized even my strategy choices didn’t matter I felt completely useless. It would have worked better as an idler, come to think of it. The game tries to compensate for this lack of complexity with a surfeit of systems, and it’s pure quantity over quality. Did it need a bespoke card game? Did it need a dungeon crawl mode, an online mode, an endless mode, *and* a story mode? Did it need 50 classes with minor differences that don’t even matter because you can just do the same thing every time? There are so many items that even with bans it’s pretty hard to purposely build out anything on a run. You’re always at the mercy of the RNG; there was no “okay, this time let me try this…”, only “well, I guess I’m doing this for this run.” (Which didn’t even matter anyway as it turned out.) There was a huge “kill your darlings” problem here, CONTENT for the sake of adding more content. I guess I have to talk about the writing, ugh. I don’t even know what to call it… they’re not really jokes, because that implies some cleverness or even attempt at cleverness, or at least some kind of setup/punchline. The game is just… obsessed with ♥♥♥♥♥. Like, the first achievement is called “Thy First Boner,” the interaction text for opening a relic chest is “fondle junk”, one of the notifications for a chest spawn is “I want to shove my face into that big chesty”… it’s not even like, aimed at the worst cishet dudes, it literally feels like the target audience is children, I can’t imagine anyone other than a 10-year-old boy finding this entertaining, and even then the “joke” is “teehee, SEX.” It’s not even clever enough to be a ‘that’s what she said’ joke; often the text twists itself in loops just for an excuse to talk about boners and ♥♥♥♥. The overall vibe was being stuck next to That Guy at a party and desperately wanting to get away. It doesn’t even rise to the level of crude humor, it was just weird and offputting, and frankly I deal with enough jackasses hopped up on how great they think their ♥♥♥♥♥ are in real life; I’m not looking for it in my recreation time. I played this game for 10 hours, mostly powered by a desire for it to be better. The premise is just so much more original and interesting than most other survivorlikes. But then I did the “random” challenge and the wind was just out of my sails. It just feels like it *should* be better — there’s a kernel of a great game in here. But I can’t think of any scenario under which I’d recommend it.

It's decently fun but I'm struggling to find a reason to keep playing after winning a few runs. You can unlock everything after a couple of hours and I don't feel like there's enough build variety or bosses to keep the game interesting. There's also too much visual clutter (enemies, spells, allies, weather, collectibles), so I find it a bit hard on the eyes. Get it on sale if you like these sorts of games. If you've played 1 you've played them all.

Boneraiser Minions is a soulful and chaotic game. You’re a necromancer trying to get some sleep in your own home crypt, while those armies of human knights and magical beings keep trying to re-slay you. It’s a unique take on the survivor-like genre: instead of fighting head-on, you summon strange and undead servants and contraptions to do the fighting for you. There is a huge variety of classes, spells, items, enemies, and minion types to keep things interesting. The game has a ton of meta progression, which you unlock fairly quickly; though much of the initial content, such as spells, perks, and bonus enemy waves, starts out locked behind this. It’s super accessible; my only criticism here is that the campaign tends to get considerably easier the more you play. There are several secret game modes to unlock as well, such as a strategy card game and Castle Conquest, where you teleport to a different map each round. It has a nice retro graphical flair, humor, and a theme of cute undead and restless spirits. It feels like it’s set in the universe of another great game: Spirits Abyss :abyssbaby: . As with all of Caisyware’s game, Boneraiser Minions is a highly polished and under-priced gem.

Visual Cluster at it´s finest. After some time in the run, i start losing track on my Character because all the effects are strarting to take over the screen. And another thing was all the Text of different minions fellt like it was more written towards a Roleplay feeling then actually give me the information on different minion types in detail.

This is a gem with a ton of replay value and lots of content for the money.

It has been a while since I played this game but if you are thinking of picking it up it is a delightfully fresh take on the survivors and it has an insane amount of unlockables it is 100% worth your money if that sounds even remotely interesting

I mean I've already poured an unhealthy amount of hours into Vampire Survivors so why not do the same with this but with the added benefit of a card game similar to Triple Triad in FF8 and a bunch of sex jokes sprinkled throughout for good measure? Plus I do love me some necromancy. (Proceeds to listen to "Tonight We'll Make Love Til We Die" from the Return of the Living Dead soundtrack)

A great addition to the genre. I have yet to complete the game in it's entirety, however it does seem to be evident as to what remains, which i believe shows one of this games better aspects and that's a deliberate reveal of the flow and features of the game, put simply it doesn't endlessly pour over the unlocks and modifiers, rather they exist and the way that they play into the game is revealed as they are acquired, and since they are so numerous, this an excellent way to incentivize both additional runs due to new unlocks and characters and to strategize said runs which makes them more novel each go. I don't expect this kind of fun to last terribly long but the excellent pixel art and chiptune soundtrack mkae up for that imo. If you like Vampire Survivors type games and especially if your looking for something small and light to run on a portable this game is excellent and I feel like it deserves more praise.

Great game that punches way above its price tag, highly recommend.