The Bazaar is a slot machine. Quite a deep and engaging slot machine. You can be good at this game. But it's a slot machine.

Someone I know planted this concept in my head. It was an unrelated game, but the idea of how many game mechanics rely on the same dopamine drip feed as gambling does to keep a player engaged. Once you start thinking about it, you see it everywhere. This isn't a super deep insight on my part, but at some point my brain flipped from "Vampire Survivors is pretty dumb" to "All games are Vampire Surivors, actually."

The Bazaar is a series of slot machines.

Every "hour" in the game, you pull the arm, and are presented with three choices for your activity. There are shops to buy items, freebie random doodads that are free but may not be particularly useful, income, XP, encounters, etc. Getting good at the game means recognizing which event is the best one to pick given your current situation and needs as well as the longer term growth of your power level. But what gets you excited is when the perfect shop appears, or a juicy enchant appears, etc., just when you need it. Jackpot.

Pick a shop, and you pull the arm, and are presented with a handful of things to buy. Getting good at the game is recognizing which items synergize with your good build, which items are good value buys, which are good growth items for snowballing later, which items might not be useful now but are often useful in combination with late game items so they are worth stashing, etc. And of course whether they are worth the price at the time given your income and balance. And if you don't like your options, you can even pull the arm one more time, hoping to get that perfect discounted upgrade on your lynchpin item. Jackpot.

Go fight a monster, and you pull the arm and hope you get the one that might drop something really good for your character and/or build. Kill the monster and you pull the arm and hope that it drops the item or skill you wanted. And of course, when you fight a monster or player you are presented with the most cacophonous kaleidoscope of sounds and confetti (with a remarkable number of bespoke little animations that they really did not have to do, bless them.) Jackpot, jackpot, ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

I don't want to say there's no skill involved. The fact that there are so many of these slot machine pulls each compounding into one another smooths out the RNG and allows for skillful play. There's the basic level of being able to pick items to form synergies and sometimes to lay them out on the board in an optimized way. There's the game knowledge you build up: learning the item roster and events, enabling you to plan ahead. Plus learning all the little secret interactions.

I'm in the middle of my second deep dive into the game, with a year or so gap since my first addiction. This time around, I've started to strategize more around the ebb and flow of the power curve more. Used to be I would just sort of settle into a build and try and scale it as well as I could, and sure maybe pivot to something different if the right item drops. What I've learned is that it's worth it to forgo long term economy and scaling to instead focus on locking in early day wins.

Early day wins can be engineered a bit easier, and still count towards your objective of 10 wins. Skip out on some economy items, don't go chasing synergies, take that cheap +4 regen, take that cheap +25 max health, buy that 20 damage item that is not going to be usable three days from now. The thing is, by the time you get to days 10, 11, etc., you might have a stupid broken scaling build, but the problem is so does everyone else in the pool. It's incredibly difficult to make an unbeatable build that scales your shields and your healing/regen, and scales your damage and burn in case they have healing/regen, and scales your poison in case they have shields, and also has enough haste/charge to avoid disruption by slow/freeze, and also has a fast enough startup to get the engine going to do all of this. So someone's gonna have something that beats you. And the longer the games go on, the more likely you are going to run into the heat death of the universe (in this case being some stupid econ scaled Pyg nonsense that will delete you on day 17 because that's the only thing in the pool on day 17 because it's the only thing that could have gotten to day 17 without 10 wins already).

All of these decisions and thinking and such, that's strategy. There's skill here. But what keeps me playing? I have to admit it, it's the hope that this time, that shop is gonna sell me everything I needed. This time every skill I'll get will be perfect synergy with my board. It's the pachinko machine sounds of the chaos of the auto-battle.

I will pound the table and tell people that this game is just as deep and thoughtful game as whatever deckbuilder roguelike du-jour is out there. But the more I play it the more I hate myself and wonder if I should take up smoking.

Four Stars.

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The Bazaar is the:

• 7th greatest Video Game of all time.
• 10th greatest Thing of all time.