‘Desktop Survivors 98’: My Favorite Game at PAX East 2025
Every spring, I have the joy of attending PAX East in Boston as a member of the games media. It’s several grueling eighteen-hour days cherished with my friends and collaborators from places like the Left Behind Game Club, Tales From the Backlog, and the “Fun” and Games podcasts. We walk the show floor, demo and preview games, attend closed-door press events, make dinner reservations that always cartoonishly balloon into gatherings of dozens of people, and so forth. But always, amongst the chaos and overwhelm of the PAX experience, there’s at least one game that sticks in my mind. Burnt out on video games as I am after a conference, I still have a childlike spark of excitement for an upcoming title, and this year its Desktop Survivors 98.
Readers may be familiar with the incredibly popular Vampire Survivors, which Brandon Hesslau, solo developer on Desktop, cites as a direct inspiration for this wonderful game. The hands-on preview I played at PAX was incredibly short, yet it immediately conveyed a clear impression of what to expect from the full release.
Desktop Survivors 98 is, for all intents and purposes, designed to be an idle game. I had the privilege to interview Hesslau after my PAX preview, and after speaking with him, I realized how many influences truly are brought to the table in unique ways with Desktop. Fans of Brotato and The Binding of Isaac will see echoes of design influence here. And one joyful quote that I can’t help but include here was that this game also pulls influence from “desktop nostalgia Tumblr,” which tells you everything you need to know: come for the legally-distinct Clippy clone, stay for the actual challenge of the experience.
As always at PAX, I word-of-mouthed this game to everyone at dinner, and all of my friends had great things to say about the experience, even if Desktop Survivors 98 didn’t emerge as their game of the show like it did for me. I get it, though, because as Hesslau stated to me, this is supposed to be a sort of “Zoom call” game that you multitask with. With tight survival times of one minute per room, a UI designed to be minimized or tabbed out at any point without crashing and interrupting your run of Desktop, it’s the perfect “second screen” game when you’re on the couch with your partner or watching a podcast.
When the demo began, in addition to some slick tutorials, you are tasked with choosing a cursor design – just like you choose a character before starting a run of Vampire Survivors. I thought this cursor concept was an incredibly inventive setup for a game like this, not least of which because the full release promises 25 different cursors, all equipped with different abilities and stats. The presence of a cursor in a survivors-style restrictive room requires you to think differently than you do with a permanently centered character in Vampire Survivors. It’s a lot more twitchy, which I normally wouldn’t like, but the dispersal of the enemies mixed with my cursor’s various abilities made the chaos feel manageable in an engaging way that surprised me.
As with Vampire, Desktop Survivors 98 quickly layers on upgrades and abilities for your character, with the charming twist that they all evoke that aforementioned desktop Tumblr nostalgia. Soon, you’ve got word art phrases zooming across your screen and Minesweeper numbers taking out hordes of enemies. It’s incredibly charming and kept a smile on my face throughout my run, as someone who grew up in the 90s.
My experience with Desktop Survivors 98 was indeed short, but the full game promises six fully fleshed out zones with distinctly different feels. Speaking with Hesslau, I learned that these regions include optional boss fights, though I didn’t encounter any while I played. I’m excited to see how the idea of a boss battle would integrate in this nostalgia-core game, whether the aesthetic would drop in something twisted like the 3D Pinball guy from Windows.
I also asked a few quick questions about the technical side of Desktop Survivors 98. Though I played with a cursor, the game does indeed contain controller support. It will also be compatible with the Steam Deck, which, thank the gods, because that’s where I sank over 30 hours into Vampire Survivors. Finally, the game does feature accessibility settings, something I didn’t dive deep into with Hesslau but was delighted to confirm were a feature he, too, felt were important to include for players.
PAX East is a celebration of what I love in gaming, and Desktop Survivors 98 embodied that for me this year. Among the 22 games I demoed, Desktop was my highlight. I’d also recommend Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Away From Home, Fretless, Skateboard Knight, and Perfect Tides: Station to Station. All of these brilliant and engaging projects could be articles of their own. Look out for our own Barry Irick’s PAX roundup on our website soon, as well as my podcast’s best-of-PAX show when it releases later this month on the Left Behind Game Club. My thanks to PAX organizers, to Brandon Hesslau for his time and creation, and all the wonderful people I get to share this event with each year. See you next March, Boston.
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