I’ve been raving about Vampire Survivors all year, which makes sense, because it got the number one spot on my Game of the Year List. The new DLC, Legacy of the Moonspell, is a bold new step for the game: it’s massive (the map is 25 times the size of a regular Survivors map) and features a bunch of new characters, weapons, and bosses. It’s also a sort of new direction for the gameplay, as it focuses on exploration as the key aspect. It costs $2, which breaks from the tradition of free content updates, but free updates will still arrive to the base game—this is just another way to support the developer.
One of the reasons I’ve praised Vampire Survivors so highly for the past few months is its simplicity. Anyone can play, get hooked, and spend several hours wiping out hoards of monsters. The maps, characters, and weapons, especially at the beginning, were also compellingly simple. Over the past year, much more has been added to the game, with Relics, Arcana, and maps that require you to explore a bit more than just running in a circle. Thankfully, this has all been added with the same design principle in mind: anyone can play and make sense of the game.
Legacy Of The Moonspell introduces a huge map. It’s clearly inspired by Japanese folklore and the setting matches this. It’s huge. There are impassable walls and cliffs, multi-layers of terrain, and expansive buildings with interiors you can explore. The fidelity of the pixel art has also improved a lot since those fledgling days of the grassy, and largely empty, Mad Forest. Vampire Survivors was never an ugly game per se, but take one look at those snow-covered trees on the new map, Mt. Moonspell, and you might even go as far to say that it’s a pretty game. It will take a good few runs to get to grips with everything available across Moonspell.
The array of new monsters, featuring the bizarre Mikoshi-nyudo, Raiju, and Kamaitachi, to name a few, are also fresh. Some of the boss fights, which I won’t spoil here, are gigantic and weird and brand-new for Vampire Survivors. The sprites for the new characters are sharp, and their mechanics for the weapons are always fun—probably the best part of Survivors, after all. It all leaves me super curious as to where the game will go in the future, because this DLC shows there’s no limit to what is possible when the crux of the game is so straightforward and compelling. This is still Vampire Survivors, it’s just bigger and better.
This is also the reason why I’m excited for developer Poncle to start actually charging for content. After a year of free upgrades that have transformed the game entirely, it’s about time everyone who has enjoyed the game can start supporting the dev. You could argue that the game’s success is largely down to its ridiculously low price (it was even lower before its price was increased ahead of the 1.0 launch), but the fact it has remained one of the most-played games on Steam all year suggests the game is probably worth more than a coffee.
If you want to support the developer, and check out the new content, we recommend you pick up the DLC. It’s still super cheap and adds plenty to the game for newcomers and Survivors vets alike. With enough love for this DLC, we might get another, and another, and another, until there is nothing in my life except for Vampire Survivors—I wouldn’t have it any other way.