In a town infested with predatory vampires and equally predatory social media companies, who you gonna call? #BLUD is a rather appealing little hack-and-slash adventure game set in a vibrant cartoon world where you play as Becky Brewster, a young teenager trying to make friends at her new school while investigating mysterious vampire attacks. The sheer amount of charm delivered by its fluid and expressive animation style goes a long way towards making #BLUD an engaging experience even if its combat can be a bit annoying sometimes.

Becky Brewster has moved to the town of Carpentersville with her father. After becoming embroiled in an invasion of vampires (as well as the machinations of the enigmatic CEO of the game’s Twitter clone, Perch), she must team up with her nerdy neighbour, Corey, and other denizens of the town as she takes up her destiny as the latest in a line of vampire hunters.

The story is not the most original, but it embraces its clear inspirations from TV of the 1990s and 2000s, such as the general premise of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the kinetic and energetic animation and exaggerated character designs from shows like Hey Arnold and Ed, Edd n Eddy. It all works well to tie the game together in a pleasant nostalgia of a bygone era, even while the omnipresence of social media and current technology grounds its setting in the modern day. #BLUD is brimming with personality, from the exaggerated animations of the character portraits during dialogue scenes to the cartoonish and varied designs of the many monsters that Becky fights. The game’s fully animated cutscenes were a particular highlight, punctuating key story moments with over-the-top action.

The actual gameplay in #BLUD is something of an isometric hack and slasher with light puzzle-solving elements. Becky acquires an upgradable hockey stick with which to bash the undead, along with a handful of other useful accessories. It’s functional enough, if somewhat basic; you acquire the majority of your abilities not very far into the game, and #BLUD lacks RPG mechanics like a levelling system or impactful new ways of fighting which would have allowed the gameplay to evolve a bit more throughout the experience. This is particularly true considering that Becky has a spellbook, into which she adds new plot-relevant spells that are only used in the narrative, not gameplay. If Becky had been able to learn spells that she could use in combat, it might have served to add a bit of variety to what is otherwise a melee-heavy combat system.

The foes that you defeat are suitably diverse, ranging from mutant rats to fire demons and fearsome feral vampires. While I liked how the tools that Becky acquires are integrated into exposing the weak points of many of the enemy types, I wish that the game’s enemies were more enjoyable to fight. For example, the aforementioned feral vampires, which become a common enemy from about halfway through the game, felt like a chore to take down due to automatically blocking and countering your attacks except during brief periods of vulnerability, dragging out any mandatory fights with them. This is particularly exacerbated when they attack in pairs and get in the way when one of them is exposed.

I was a fan of most of the game’s boss fights; #BLUD likes to throw in one-time game mechanics for these encounters, meaning that in addition to the standard hack-and-slash combat, you might have a section where you’re throwing bombs out of a speeding bus, or taking them on in a giant mech suit. While not all of the boss fights were equally engaging, they were all quite memorable and served as a particular showcase of the detailed (and often somewhat gory) cartoonish action in many of the attack animations.

When you aren’t following the game’s critical objectives, there are plenty of side quests to follow, which are the source of most of the optional weapon upgrades. While a lot of them were fairly simple fetch quests, I actually quite liked how oddly mundane errands like finding dog treats to feed your neighbour’s pet or cutting the back lawn grounded the setting and heightened the contrast between Becky’s normal teenage life and the absurd undead apocalypse happening around town, of which most of the grown-ups appear bizarrely ignorant. It would have been nice if all the side quests worked properly, however; I encountered a number of bugs with the game’s side content, whether it be objectives only spawning or acknowledging my success when I entered the area from a particular entrance, to the quest just not functioning properly at all and having a crucial NPC not appear where the mission log said they should.