Vampire Survivors

Vampire Survivors doesn’t ask much of you, just to survive an unstoppable torrent of death with nothing but auto-firing garlic, upgrade math, and vibes. What starts as a janky pixel-art oddity blooms into one of the most obsessively replayable roguelites in recent memory, a game where you don’t press attack at all, you just are the attack.

Monsters flood your screen like it owes them money. You pick a character, step foot in a map that looks like someone copy-pasted Castlevania’s lawn, and move. That’s it. You don’t press buttons to fight; your weapons snap, slash, orbit or explode on their own. The only thing you manage is positioning, the rest is chaos theory.

And it’s glorious.

Leveling up means choosing from an escalating pool of wildly overpowered weapons, bibles, lightning, even birds that carpet bomb zones while cartwheeling in orbit (as birds do). But if you can pair each with its passive “soulmate” (like matching Fire Wands with Spinach, because of course), they evolve into screen-melting megaton machines. Builds snowball. Rooms melt. You go full-Tank Mode simply by walking forward while everything else explodes.

Survive 30 minutes? You win. Death himself shows up and ends your run. Unless you kill him, too.

Vampire Survivors is both brain-off bliss and spreadsheet-fueled mastery. It’s Pac-Man with god powers and no walls. It’s a dopamine firehose dressed as a ‘90s CD-ROM screensaver with bats. And once it gets its hooks in you, you’ll be stuck in this loop long past sunrise, chasing secrets you didn’t know you needed.

Turns out the real vampire is you, draining time instead of blood.