Lamp and Vamp vants you to suck blood, but with strategy
If there's one thing that Lamp and Vamp has taught us, it's that being a vampire is tough. Trying to get back to your coffin, which is inconveniently laying in the middle of a town, while villagers stalk and fry you up with their lanterns? Talk about mob mentality! It's almost like they're forcing you to incapacitate them and drink their blood. You can see what we mean by using your browser to play Lamp and Vamp, developer GlobZ's winning entry for the Procedural Death Jam.
In your journey back to a peaceful slumber, both your vampire and the opposing guards move one hexagonal space per turn. Stepping into beams of light from the patrol's lanterns alerts the guards to your presence, but you can predict some of their moves by watching red arrows that show their evening stroll's impending route.
Since there's one of you and many of them, your vampire has a few powers to make things a bit more fair. Beyond drinking the blood of guards to replenish health, you can turn into a bat to fly over obstacles, or turn into a ghost to pass right through them. You're also invisible to the guards during your Casper ghostly state, but lowering your opacity or sprouting wings drains health, so you'll either need to use the forms sparingly or replenish strength with the guards' blood. Reaching the coffin also grants slight, stackable boosts to powers of your choice, so you can play to your strengths accordingly.
As you clear stages, guard counts rise and they start enlisting the help of priests equipped with better lanterns and vials of tossable holy water. In other words, just because you can surpass the first few stages with a cape over your eyes doesn't mean you'll sail through the rest of the game. See how long you can last prowling through towns! Just watch out for those priests - considering their aptitude with holy water, we're fairly certain they were snipers in another life.
[Image: GlobZ]
