Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde is one of the likely many games to follow the trail that Vampire Survivors blazed, being a roguelite bullet hell game where you dodge a never ending stream of enemies while trying to build up abilities and upgrades to obliterate your foes and stay alive for a certain amount of time.

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Like most roguelikes, Spirit Hunters is pretty opaque about a lot of the mechanics, which is part of the fun, but some things are either poorly explained in a fun-detracting way, either because they blindside you or they’re so unintuitive that you might not even discover them. Here are some things we wished we knew, so you’ve got the heads-up when you start.

7 All Pickups Disappear

Pickups will start flashing if you leave them long enough, indicating that they're about to disappear

Given that this game is quite similar to Vampire Survivors, you might end up with expectations about gameplay that will end up costing you valuable resources or even losing the round you’re playing.

For example, in Vampire Survivors, everything dropped by monsters or destroyed stage elements will either persist in the environment or in the case of Experience, combine into a different-colored gem of the same value. Not so in Spirit Hunters, where if you don’t pick up dropped items, they’ll disappear. So make sure to either pick up all those Blue Souls, Crystals and Runes or be prepared to live without them!

6 There Are Some Triggering Swarms In The Spine Dunes

Though mostly a creepy-free  game, the swarms in the Spine Dunes can be a little upsetting

While being scared and creeped out during a game can be part of a good time, sometimes it can be a bit much, especially if it catches you off-guard.

While Spirit Hunters has nothing about it that’s intentionally spooky or gross, some people, especially those with trypophobia might have it set off in the Spine Dunes, an unlockable level in the desert area with an enemy that’s a swarm of flies.

That might not sound too bad (unless you have entomophobia or polyphobia), but they’re shown as clusters of black dots and there’s a lot of them, filling up the screen with a pattern that may be triggering to some.

5 About The Different Currencies

There are a few currencies in the game, used to buy different things

It’s not an uncommon thing for games to feature different currencies, used to unlock different features in a game, especially in roguelites. Spirit Hunters has three that are used for permanent upgrades on the Divinity Web: Runes, Crystals, and Embers and one that is used to buy various helpful things in-game: coins.

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Runes, the most common resource, are used mostly to buy upgrades for your abilities or characters. Crystals are used to unlock abilities, nodes on the Divinity Web that essentially act as gates for Hunter upgrades and new characters. Embers are the rarest currency and are only acquirable on hard mode maps, and they’re used for unlocking similar things as Crystals, but further into the web.

4 You’re Bigger Than You Look

You take up more space than you think

Though the game has an eye-catching art style, the hand-drawn look hides a pretty important element: your hitbox.

That’s right, though grazing enemies and cutting it close for maximum effect may be a common tactic in games like these, you may end up eating a few hits if you try to play too close to the danger zone in Spirit Hunters. At the very least, you’ll want to learn what the actual hitboxes of the characters are if you don’t want to play defensively the whole time.

3 Maxine Is A Difficult Character

Maxine is a bit of a glass cannon, unfortunately, she's more glass than cannon

Maxine is one of the unlockable characters in the game, so you would think that she would have a skillset that would give her a different playstyle than the other characters, but still amounting to a side grade if not a full-on upgrade in terms of power.

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Different though she may be, she’s a bit of a downgrade and playing her makes the game quite difficult. Though she’s the fastest character in the game and most of her starting synergies give her a high cooldown reduction rate, it’s simply not worth the fact that she’s so squishy, with a whopping 75% reduction on health, making her death inevitable except at the hands of the most skilled. Maybe after a few patches, she won't be so bad especially when compared to characters in similar games.

2 Divinity Web Upgrades Are Permanent

The upgrades are permanent, so choose them wisely...or play a lot and get them all.

In Vampire Survivors, you can earn coins and then use those coins to buy permanent upgrades for future runs and also get a 100 percent refund on those upgrades to reallocate as you please.

This is not so in Spirit Hunters, so put some thought into the upgrades you’re grabbing since once you buy a node on the Divinity Web, it’s gonna stay like that, which includes things like unlocking pets to randomly appear in cages during your run. You may want to avoid unlocking those if you don’t want them muddying up your pick pool.

1 You Only Get Four Abilities Per Run (And Five Pets)

Choose wisely, you only get four abilities and five pets per run

Though the game has plenty of abilities to choose from when you start a run, choose them wisely and try to have a build in mind, because once you pick four abilities, that’s all you're getting and other level ups will only include upgrades for those four abilities.

The game is not forthcoming with this knowledge, so you may end up picking abilities only to inadvertently lock yourself out of an ability you really want. Luckily, you can pause the game and your abilities and their upgrades will be listed, with blank boxes indicating that you have less than four abilities.

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