Greed Costs You Blood in 'High Stakes'
How much of your life are you willing to bet against a vampire?
If you’re going to place a bet on your life against any monster conjured by the human imagination, vampires might be the worst. As far as their classic depiction goes, they’re frightfully strong and capable of nefarious transformations, but their most terrifying qualities are also their most human: they’re cunning, manipulative, and possessed with an appetite for mind games. So when a vampire deals you a set of cards in exchange for your chance at life, how much are you willing to risk? In a game called High Stakes, this is a dangerous path that you’re forced to take—at the expense of falling prey to your mortal impulses.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate just how deliciously cruel High Stakes sets the stage: it’s the year 2024 in Las Vegas and vampires have taken most of your blood. If you wish to live, you have to gamble for it, drop by drop. You’re in Vegas after all, baby. Real high rollers deal in buckets of the red stuff.
The game in question is deceptively simple. In front of you are nine cards, arranged face down in a grid. For each card you turn over, you earn back a bit of your blood. Flip a Vampire card, however, and you lose points based on how many cards you’ve opened. After five rounds, your score is converted into the blood you earn back, and then you play again.
At your disposal are hint tokens that can add a bit of teeth to your guesswork. Each time you clear a row or column, you can use these hint tokens to do things like predict a card’s value, compare the value of an open card with those next to it, or highlight the general area where a Vampire card hides. If you think you know where the Vampire card is, you can use a wooden stake to stab it for bonus points and end the round.
Pardon the phrase, but the mechanics of High Stakes are such a typical vampire dick move. Make no mistake—I love it. Leave it to a bunch of high-functioning bloodsuckers to play with their food using methods that prey on a human’s worst instincts. The game posits the unstoppable nature of greed even in the face of death: is that just you fighting hard for your life or are you actually getting hooked on the thrill? When you earn enough of your blood back, you can use it as currency to sit with other vampires offering larger payouts. The risks are bigger, obviously, but surely you have enough blood to keep going, right? Is that pallid-looking face of yours just from excitement or do you need to lie down?
At the end of a winning streak, the vampire asks me for a final gamble. Double or nothing. Sometimes, I bite. Most times, the dealer does.
Often in a round, I end up with two cards left, each with a fifty-fifty chance of hiding a Vampire. It’s during these incredibly high-stakes moments when the game’s tension reveals my worst impulses: why stop now when you’ve come this far? There’s always the option to pass a round, forfeit your score, and incur a negligible penalty, but it turns out I may yet learn when to cut my losses and move on.
I’m 32 years old and I’ve never played in a casino. I may keep it that way indefinitely.
Image Credit: Tyler Anderson and Jamie Lee for My Famicase Exhibition 2020
It’s also worth noting the origins of High Stakes. This project by developer Krystman is the product of a game jam called A Game By Its Cover, a non-competitive event that prompts participants to make a game based on any fictional cartridge archived in the My Famicase Exhibition. The exhibit invites artists and designers from all around the world to imagine their own video game cover art on a Famicom cartridge. While the above design inspired a few other games, this version of High Stakes stands out for crafting a simple game that exposes a person’s hubris even in the face of the macabre.
As you get lost in the gameplay loop of High Stakes, you’d be forgiven for not realizing how little the vampires actually play a part in all this. There’s no catch, no sleight of hand—everything depends on how you respond to the odds in front of you. They know how this plays out; they were human once. In the end, these vampires don’t even need to hypnotize you or use their inhuman strength to bend you to their will. They just need you to play the cards long enough until the cards play you right into their waiting mouths.
You can play High Stakes for free on itch.io.