Vampire Survivors: our collective obsession with the quirky, genre-defining indie game

The world of Dracula and the Belmont family is coming to Vampire Survivors. The newly announced downloadable content for the auto-shooter survival game, Ode to Castlevania, promises a bunch of new stuff: 20 characters, 40 weapons, an extra-large stage, and over 30 music tracks. Developer Poncle said in its announcement post on X that the $3.99 expansion should contain more than 10 hours worth of gameplay — though it’s not clear if there will actually be any vampires in the game (I’m still betting there won’t be).

The new Vampire Survivors DLC is set to launch on October 31st on the PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, Android, and iOS. You can also track its release with a cheesy, ‘90s-era countdown timer site set up by the developer. (Mind your speaker volume before visiting, as it auto-plays a short loop of some of the sick new music.)

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Vampire Survivors, the hit bullet hell survival game where you take on hordes of pixelated monsters, is coming to Apple Arcade on August 1st, Apple announced on Tuesday.

The game is already available for free on iOS, but this new version (technically called Vampire Survivors Plus) will be ad-free and include two DLC packs, Legacy of the Moonspell and Tides of the Foscari, that players typically have to buy separately. You’ll also be able to play multiplayer with up to four people on one iOS device.

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Vampire Survivors is out on Switch on Thursday (it’s great), and sometime in the future, you might be able to bring your save file to Nintendo’s console — and everywhere else the game is available, developer Poncle announced.

“A lot of people have been asking for cross-save, and the Nintendo Switch port will most likely increase demand even more,” Poncle wrote in a post on Steam on Thursday. “We’re working on it: we have already run successful tests in moving saves between PC, mobile, and consoles, while also adding cloud save slots! We’ll keep you updated, but save data is a very delicate thing, so this will really need a lot of testing and an adequate amount of time in the oven to be released in a safe, fully working state.”

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Vampire Survivors with a friend is surprisingly slow. Typically, the indie hit feels frantic as your character automatically uses various weapons so you can defeat waves of oncoming enemies, scoop up experience gems, and race toward far-strung items across levels. The perfectly tuned colors and sounds that make the game feel like walking through a pixel-packed casino add to the chaos.

But when playing Vampire Survivors with my wife on the Nintendo Switch, I noticed that I was suddenly being a lot more thoughtful with every move I made. The game’s new co-op mode forces you to share a screen with up to three of your friends, and that meant my wife and I were constantly communicating so that we could safely inch around levels and use our weapons against the game’s ever-growing waves of enemies.

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Vampire Survivors, one of the breakout games of 2022, is being turned into an animated television show. The show seems to be very early in production (it doesn’t yet have a writer and will be shopped around, Deadline reports), but I’m intrigued to see how the game will be adapted into a TV series.

There’s no real plot in Vampire Survivors. The point of the game is to live for as long as you can against increasingly large waves of monsters while leveling up various weapons and items until you become so outrageously powerful that you can walk away from the game and still survive. (Maybe that’s just how I play it.) Also, there are lots of pretty lights and colors.

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Vampire Survivors is getting a second expansion, and like the previous one, it will cost $2. The new fantasy-themed DLC, Tides of the Foscari, includes eight new characters, 13 weapons, and a new stage, and it comes out on April 13th.

Developer Poncle is already teasing characters like a mage and a swordsman as well as weapons like a spellbook and a sword named “Eskizzibur.” I can’t wait to try out all of the new additions — I’m sure they’ll all be unbelievably broken in some delightful ways.

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Despite the name, Vampire Survivors currently doesn’t have any vampires among its 41 playable characters and hordes of enemies, but that could change with the game’s first DLC expansion. On the Steam page for the newly announced expansion, Legacy of the Moonspell, developer Poncle is hinting that we might finally see vampires in the game.

“Legacy of the Moonspell is the first DLC for Vampire Survivors, and introduces a brand new stage, new characters, new monsters, and new weapons to slaughter them with,” Poncle writes. “There might even be some hidden mysteries for those of an inquiring mindset, but we can neither confirm nor deny the presence of vampires…”

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Xbox Game Pass is getting some great games in November, including the official Xbox releases of two of my favorite games of the year: Return to Monkey Island and Vampire Survivors.

Return to Monkey Island is the newest entry in the Monkey Island point-and-click adventure game series. It’s a delightful homage to the classic titles that adds some much-needed polish to smooth out some of the more annoying aspects of old-school LucasArts adventure games. It first launched on Steam and Nintendo Switch in September, and it will be available on Xbox Series X / S, Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and PlayStation 5 on November 8th.

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When it was announced that Vampire Survivors — a darling of the indie gaming community — is increasing its price on September 21st ahead of its V1.0 release, some folks may have expected the worst. Thankfully, its developer, studio Poncle, has now announced that the game’s list price on Steam will increase by a paltry $2, bringing it to $4.99 starting at 6PM ET.

That means there’s still time to grab the game for $2.99, the price it’s been since entering early access back in December 2021. Studio Poncle says that the decision to increase prices ahead of the game’s full release was to “keep the option open to eventually enter some of the usual seasonal sales.” The game is also available on PC Game Pass, with no mention of any plans to remove it from the platform upon leaving early access.

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If you play games on PC or own a Steam Deck, the time is now to pick up Vampire Survivors. The indie megahit is inching very close to its 1.0 release, but before that, the price is set to increase tomorrow, September 21st. Developer Poncle has not yet disclosed what the full price of the game will be, but it’s going to be higher than the current $2.99 you can get it for on Steam.

Vampire Survivors launched in Steam Early Access back in December, and it’s remained that cheap, even as it grew a huge following and the developers added much more content to it through frequent updates. It’s also available to subscribers of Microsoft’s PC Game Pass, but this is your last chance to get it on Steam for about the price of a cup of coffee.

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Vampire Survivors’ new 0.10.0 update adds a cheats menu, and after using it to unlock some things I had been stuck on, I dearly wish that more games included one.

Vampire Survivors, if you haven’t heard of it, is a delightful game about leveling up and destroying literally thousands of monsters in a single run. I’d describe it as roguelike-ish; you pick a starting character with certain attributes and a specific weapon, and you’ll level up that weapon, other weapons, and other items as you collect gems by defeating enemies. Your weapons fire automatically, so you mostly just have to worry about picking up experience and items while avoiding baddies.

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I was floored as soon as I got to the main menu of Vampire Survivors. I knew this hot indie darling sounded up my alley when I heard it described as a reverse-bullet hell blended with a roguelike, but I was not prepared for it to hit so close to home. While the main menu looks low-rent and the Castlevania-inspired aesthetics seems at first like a poor imitation, what stopped me in my tracks was the starting character. Antonio Belpaese: the first in a lineup of four Belpaese family members and a menagerie of other characters with incredibly Italian-sounding names. Even before playing a minute of the game, I was enthralled by my namesake taking the lead. As I struggled through the first few runs and slowly unlocked more characters, I felt like this game represented me and my big Italian-American immigrant family in a small way that elevated the whole experience like few games I have ever played.

When people talk about Vampire Survivors, it’s all about how much fun the mechanics of the game are and how it’s blown up on Steam for the cheap Early Access price of just $3. The gameplay is indeed exceptional. You try to survive an onslaught of increasing numbers of baddies using only auto-firing weapons, slowly improving your arsenal with pickups and passive power-ups. It’s a roguelite that gives that dopamine hit as the numbers go up and is completely devoid of a story, but it is rich in culture. Specifically, my family’s culture.

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Vampire Survivors is an Early Access roguelike on Steam that has completely sunk its teeth into me.

Each round starts simply: you have just one weapon to take on a few baddies. The weapon autofires, so you only have to worry about moving your character to avoid enemies and scoop up experience gems. But as you level up, get more weapons, and fight more monsters, your screen quickly becomes filled with a smorgasbord of magical weapons and fearsome enemies covering nearly every inch of the screen. Like so:

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