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

When Vampire Survivors first exploded onto the scene, it was pretty much all I could think about. The formula of jumping into runs, taking on thousands of enemies, and becoming absurdly overpowered kept me picking up the game again and again — Steam says I’ve played it for more than 60 hours. Over time, though, despite the game’s many updates and expansions, the formula got stale, and I haven’t played it in more than a year. But I’ve become obsessed with the Vampire Survivors universe once again thanks to the new spinoff Vampire Crawlers.

Vampire Crawlers — technically, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors — successfully translates the Vampire Survivors experience into a whole new style of game. This time, instead of a shoot ’em up crossed with a roguelike, it’s dungeon crawler mixed with a roguelike deckbuilder. You’ll still play as different characters, take on waves of enemies, and craft laughably strong builds, but instead of fighting bad guys in real time, you hunt them down by walking through retro-style dungeon crawler maps and dueling in turn-based deckbuilder card battles. The maps still have a charming pixelated style — many enemies look like blown-up versions of the enemy sprites from Survivors, which is really silly.

Vampire Survivors is finally launching cross-saves today, but they won’t be available on PlayStation to start and have a “very slim” chance of coming to the platform because of a “legal issue.”

“Last month, we told everyone that cross-save would be available on PlayStation 4 / 5, PC, Xbox, Android and iOS alongside our next free VS update in April,” according to a Steam post from Poncle, the game’s developer. “But at last [sic] minute, we’ve run into a legal issue on PlayStation we weren’t aware of that requires us to share info on our partners that we’re unable to. The chances of Cross-Save coming to PlayStation consoles are now very slim, but not impossible, so we’re going to keep working alongside PlayStation to resolve these problems.”

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.)

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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…”

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.