The Dishwasher:
Vampire Smile Review (XBLA)

A girl I liked told me she made art, so I went to her show. Framed on the walls were paintings of teddy bears dressed in black tape and crying blood, and bug-eyed schoolgirls holding knives. I don't need to tell the end of that story.

At first blush, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile looks like a chunk of the high-school misfit's sketchbook that strives for abject darkness but stumbles badly on kitsch. It's very much a playable My Chemical Romance song. Are you serious, I thought; or maybe my question was, how serious are you: barefoot cyborg ninja girl cutting through an army of psycho zombie killers, men in black, and pale torsos riding cybernetic goat legs? After a playthrough and a half, I'm still not sure I have the details straight. But details are beside the point, because Vampire Smile simply wants to generate an atmosphere like the following combination of words: psycho robot bleeding rotten shank bag artillery kitten vicious gunning undead capitalistic shadow insanity devil screaming telekinetic furious bleeding lizard mutilation teeth. It's a thick undifferentiated pulp churning out blue sparks and bone gristle.

James Silva's first Xbox Live Arcade game, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, took itself a little too seriously, was too difficult for most to finish, and so came off like "a thing for those who like that sort of thing." Likewise, Vampire Smile dutifully mashes up a number of genre depictions of hell, from the J-horror of F.E.A.R. to the chainsaw massacres of Gears of War.

But Vampire Smile also shows that I had Silva all wrong. First, he is not that serious. He is, after all, the man who made I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1, the psychedelic zombie-shooter satire that rightfully perches atop the Xbox Live Indie Games charts. Caught in the guts and surgical tubing of Vampire Smile are scraps of wit and wry meta-commentary, meaning this deviant artist is human after all.

Second, the sequel is both easier and less repetitious than Dead Samurai, meaning it's possible to notice these signs of Silva's humanity.

Third, Vampire Smile is the most viscerally satisfying videogame in recent memory. For all the intensity of its looks, they're sidelined the instant I pick up the controller. This is a rare hack-and-slash game that is truly suggestive of the brutal acts of violence represented by the verbs "hack" and "slash." Whether you play as barefoot cyborg ninja girl Yuki (recommended) or her brother the Dishwasher (the eponymous protagonist of the first game), their moves transcend the stiff button presses of "computer" games from Final Fight to Shank, which feel downright polite in comparison. They move, in other words, like people who know they want to kill people. During one of hundreds of fights, I might press the attack button 23 times. But instead of seeing, say, four groups of five sequential moves and three extra—the rote patterns into which these games inevitably devolve—I see Yuki swinging her arms with determination, sometimes catching a glint of her curved blade; I hear horrible cutting noises; and then I suddenly see a fallen body and blood on the wall behind her. This is a great illusion.

The game pulls a similar feat with its style, to the point that I forget what it reminds me of. During the cut scenes between each level, boxy straight-lipped characters tell in comic-book fashion an inchoate tale of evil corporations, cyborg infestations, and an overall need for redemption. (Who doesn't need that?) It's possible to glean that Yuki was accidentally killed by her brother in the last game, and that she has returned, hellbent on bringing down the Man. It's not possible to tell much more.

Then the game proper starts, its 13 winding levels each ending in a boss. A palimpsest of visual effects—including but not limited to extreme blur and depth of field, subtle flickering, blown-out spots of light, sudden close-ups and slowdowns, dramatic shadows, camera shake, and blazes of color like the face of a taser—all but totally obscure Silva's drawings. They cast glowing levels in that haze that I associate with sleepwalking and anesthesia, and they turn battle into theater. Psycho zombies and chimerical abominations with names like Murderfly and Skeletank become real, precisely because things are left to my imagination. I can only barely make out their hand-drawn outlines. Blood sprays, my own magic attacks blind me, the camera jerks in and out; and these monochrome pen-and-paper sketches dissolve in my mind into hardened clammy bodies. The more I play, the more the ink is literally smudged into a slurry stew. An observer might describe the game as Tom and Jerry clashing in a red cloud of entrails.

There is a reason these heaps of effects don't undermine Vampire Smile's aesthetic, and prove Silva knew exactly what he was doing when he put them together. The game remains terribly felt, and as such the gameplay is profoundly psychological. Fights are lightning-fast—both Yuki and the Dishwasher can flit freely around the arenas, phasing through enemies and walls. The screen careens wildly, trying to find them, and bodies are meanwhile flying apart. Although there must be a theoretical limit to how fast I can press the button and how many blows Yuki can whip out in a given second, there doesn't appear to be. So I press the button with blind stabbing thoughts, and electrified minor chords in the soundtrack press me harder.

It may be the conditioned response to a decade of games instructing me to furiously "tap button" to release myself from a monster's grasp—but these repeated button presses underpin the game with a sustained desperation. Battles throw me into the eye of a storm, then leave me feeling empty. Like 99 percent of games, Vampire Smile's emotional range is limited to anger and fear. But very few strip away the other emotions so cleanly and ruthlessly, leaving just the two. Aesthetics, of course, are less about style than about the sensuous and imagined. Thus the game is beautiful not for its "art," but for its trembling, clotted combat.

The presence of "real" gameplay is really just icing on the cake. There are combos and there are air juggles, each signifying the player's small triumphs under adversity. The standalone Arcade levels outside the campaign focus on various aspects of the fighting engine, drawing out the "game" of the game. The simple strategy of displacing Yuki or the Dishwasher behind attackers especially shines in difficult later sections, as good timing will trick enemies into attacking each other, conjuring memories of Doom's volatile cybernetic demons.

Vampire Smile's great hook, its moment when theme and mechanics and style are unified, is the race for the finishing move. Enemies can only be killed when they start to emit blue sparks. At this point I press a button, the camera zooms in, and Yuki dismembers with her katana, decapitates with her chainsaw, or drains the lifeblood out of a beast with her six-foot, weaponized syringe. Her black-metal shrieking signals my rage, each move buys me two seconds of invulnerability against other attacks, and it looks utterly killer.

This isn't a flawless game, as it ultimately requires an acquired skill-set to operate, as well as faltering in how its levels are conceived. Each is only briefly indicative of a place and a time, and mostly function as a way to channel the player from encounter to encounter. Although Vampire Smile thrives on disorientation, it's in an altogether different sense that the player must mechanically follow arrows up and down, left and right all over the map.

But that's a matter of craft, not inspiration. A late encounter with something described as a "vegetative neuromancer" should serve as a model for ambitious designers. The neuromancer wages psychological warfare, and Silva drags out a very familiar art-game trope to depict this. But the razor-wire timing of the camera cuts, the song-like ABA clarity of the boss battle, and the unmistakable signs of charisma made my jaw drop even as I continued to "tap button." These are the moments we die for.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile was developed by Ska Studios. It is available digitally via the Xbox Live Arcade.

Ryan Kuo is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is an editor at Kill Screen. Find him on Twitter as @twerkface.

Watch the trailer for The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile: