Turning the Bullet Heaven into an overlay widget that thinks Windows 98 is the dopest shit in the world is a tremendous novelty.
Desktop Survivors 98 is a special game. It annoys the heck out of me sometimes. But it’s special. It’s the kind of game you get when someone has a goofy idea and fully commits to it, pushing the concept as far as you’d think it can possibly go and then some. I’ve been playing it, and perhaps more importantly playing with it, ever since coming across it at PAX East 2025. It’s been the subject of a bit for the site, it’s been a dreadful distraction from my work, it’s been one of the most memorable games I’ve encountered this year.
I’ve come to realize there’s really something to the whole “Bullet Heaven” thing. Ever since Vampire Survivors dropped out of nowhere and lit this genre on fire, it’s seemed impossible to play a game like it and not have fun. It’s part lizard brain stuff I’m sure, but there’s also a lot to nailing that balance between skill and movement, and managing numbers and building… a build. Bullet Heaven games just seem to do that inherently. And it’s not doing these things in a scary, dopamine-excavating way games like Balatro do. Or at least it doesn’t feel that way to me. And I’m the one who is literally afraid of Balatro, so.
Anyway, Desktop Survivors 98 is another one of these Bullet Heaven joints, but it has a bit. A strong bit, and one that Desktop Survivors pours all of its energy into. It’s based on old Windows OS stuff, things like how desktops looked back then, from the text to the icons, from the serene, landscape-like background art to the grungy, unnatural appeal of games like DOOM and Solitaire. Yeah, I compared DOOM and Sollitaire. It makes sense when you look at them together. And that’s what Desktop Survivors 98 does. It puts all that shit together in a Bullet Heaven. And your cursor is the hero.
Discovering this thing at PAX East 2025 started in my hotel room. One of my convention roommates just said the classic line: “You gotta check this out.” I was told to look for the booth with the CRTs. Sure enough, the booth that looked like someone turned a Windows 98 desktop into an office cubicle was easy to spot. The vibes were immaculate in person, and they continued into the game itself. With a legally distinct version of Microsoft’s Clippy (but a sword instead of a paper clip), you’re led into a series of dungeons that have you battling different icons and enemies that, if not almost directly ripped out of old software, look like they could have been.
And it’s all happening over your desktop. That’s the really fun part. Desktop Survivors 98 is overlay software. It’s like an old widget that lived over your stuff back in the day, before “widget” was really a word we used for things like that. You can boot it up, then minimize it, and “Swordy” will just hang out in the corner of your screen until you need a distraction. Then, click on him, and you’ll be able to play Desktop Survivors over whatever it is you’re doing. Writing an essay and need a break? Desktop Survivors. Watching something on YouTube and want something to do with your hands? Desktop Survivors. Thought of a goofy joke and want to post it on social media? Desktop Survivors! It rules, even if it’s dangerous for dopamine-starved individuals like myself.
As a Bullet Heaven, gimmicks aside, Desktop Survivors 98 takes some interesting turns. For example, it’s more of a dungeon-crawler than a single screen survival gauntlet. Each room has a time limit, and you have to navigate through several to find your way to the next floor, or boss. And there’s an ending of sorts to each dungeon as well. So it’s not like Vampire Survivors in that you’re encouraged to maximize your run, choose a build, and run out the timer blowing up the whole screen. You probably won’t see the end state of the stuff you collect, unless you’ve put the time into grinding. And by then you’ve probably already beaten the last boss.
Which is probably for the best, because if you needed to grind to get to a winnable state, I’d be having way less fun. The numbers are pretty gnarly, in terms of how much money you need to unlock things and how much you can earn while you play. There are other incentives to keep playing, such as a couple different minigames, like a themed survival mode or other cute, little widgets you can play with to earn upgrades. A lot of that stuff feels like padding though, even if they double as clever ways to extend the bit further. The balance in things to do versus how they reward you and what those rewards feed into is definitely off.
There’s also something off about how enemies track you, how they spawn in, and how you pick up your little money and exp gimmicks. Like I mentioned earlier you move through rooms instead of occupying a larger, scrolling space. And not only do some enemies move fast, they are locked in on your movements, unrelentingly so. And pickups don’t latch onto you and follow you in a way that feels like they should, even when you have pickup range upgrades. So a lot of rooms end up feeling like you’re constantly circling a growing pile of stuff you can’t quite collect, because you’re evading a swarm of enemies that won’t let up and are impossible to outrun unless you’re locked the fuck in. You just have to wait out the timer to collect your goodies.
This problem compounds if you can’t get enough damage early on, leading to situations where you’re doing your best to survive the timer, but can’t quite get enough kills to level up before the timer goes out, forcing you to move on to the next room. It can be frustrating when you can see a run crumbling before your eyes in that way, because you can’t really find an opportunity to squeeze in and pick up enough exp to make more enemies spawn and get stronger at a sensible pace. Plus those aggressive enemies, when they do spawn in, do so in ways you simply can’t avoid, making the damage feel “cheap” sometimes.
All of the above, together, can make Desktop Survivors 98 feel like a grind (derogatory). It practically copies Vampire Survivors’ system, in which you spend your hard-earned cash on permanent upgrades. But because the upgrades are so expensive, it can take several runs to buy just one. Put that together with the way you can kind of just flatline in a run based on the weird properties I described, and you can just get stuck. These games sing when the balance is right; there’s a curve to your progress through unlockable characters, stat upgrades, and taking on harder and harder challenges. When we say something feels good, it’s because you barely notice you’re just grinding and repeating the core loop when synergistic events are happening at a reasonable clip. But when one or more elements throw the curve off into, I dunno, a lump, you notice. It’s like when you hit the grass in Mario Kart and your ride immediately slows down.You feel the problem in your bones. Your gamer bones.
Desktop Survivors 98 is a special game. It’s the gimmick so perfectly and thoroughly realized through every little graphic and UI element. It’s the novelty of having fun feeling nostalgic for old computer stuff, even if you didn’t really have access to everything being referenced. It’s the overlay concept being so unusual in 2025. Playing this game reminds me of the rising wave of convention hype, of visiting the booth with Will and having fun just soaking in the energy. And being able to just boot it up over top of whatever else I’m doing is perfect for what it is. This isn’t just a neat little Vampire Survivors ripoff with some balance problems. It’s fun and clever in its own right, and also feels like a toy in a unique way.
When I boot up Desktop Survivors 98, I don’t just think about playing it, I think about how I can play with it, what I can do with it, how I can turn the next session into the next shitpost. Maybe next time I’ll play it over an N-Gage emulator, or a YouTube gardening show, or a picture of your dog. Who can say? But I bet it’ll be great any which way.
Score: 8
This review is based on a PC code provided by the developer.
