How Vampire Survivors built its own unlikely genre, the "survivor-like"

1.6.2025
By Steven T. Wright, Contributor
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of Poncle's Vampire Survivors, perhaps the biggest indie sleeper hit of the 2020s so far. The initial setup is deceptively simple and reminiscent of the Flash era of games—choose an undead-slaying hero and wander around a top-down map, whipping baddies and grabbing the XP-granting crystals they drop when they die. Each level slowly turns the heat up as the lone zombies turn into shambling hordes of beastmen, vampire bats, and even Death himself, all jockeying to bring your run to an end.

Vampire Survivors wasn't the first game in the emerging "survivor-like" genre—sometimes referred to as "bullet heaven," "autoshooter," or "wave shooter" games. That honor may belong to Magic Survival, a mobile game that Vampire Survivors developer Luca Galante cites as his major inspiration.

But Vampire Survivors is by far the most successful. Like fellow genre pioneers Demon's Souls and Return of the Obra Dinn, Vampire Survivors had its share of familiar elements, but it innovated in a few key ways that inspired other developers to try their hand at similar games.

Vampire Survivors is an auto-attack game, which is relatively uncommon outside the mobile game space. Each weapon acquired over the course of a run functions differently, and you can choose which ones to upgrade (or prioritize) as you experiment with different combinations. For example, the Whip attacks every few seconds in whatever direction your character is facing, making it great for wiping out large groups of enemies at a time, while the King Bible slowly spins around you, killing enemies at a distance and granting some passive defense.
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Two seemingly minor design decisions have a big impact on Vampire Survivor's moment-to-moment gameplay, and perhaps its overall success. You have to pick up the XP crystals that your enemies drop on defeat, which means that you have to think about your route through a level. When you kill a massive horde of bats, you then have to figure out how to get back to that trove of precious XP before too much time passes.

Canny players should also be on the lookout for all-important chests that spawn every now and then—they not only provide you with new weapons for that run, they also shower you with metacurrency coins that you can use to unlock new gear and characters between runs. Chests become especially important as you begin to master the game, as they can give you special "evolved" versions of your arms that are nearly mandatory for defeating some of the game's tougher challenges. These evolved weapons require you to fulfill specific criteria, such as collecting two weapons on the same character and leveling one to full, and bring another level of depth to the proceedings.

The real genius of Vampire Survivors though is how it hones the roguelike's addictive qualities to a razor's edge. There's very little in the way of preliminaries or empty time in each play session—runs tend to cap out at 15 to 30 minutes and rarely go longer. Past the first few levels, Vampire Survivors turns up the difficulty quickly, and your "build" tends to come together within a few minutes or not at all.

And of course, the flashy chest-opening animations are reminiscent of the dopamine-showering loot box triggers seen in gacha games or even Overwatch, and are a major part of the genre's appeal. Even abortive runs never feel like a waste of time, since you're collecting currency to unlock (and upgrade) new characters over the long-term. It's easy to see how this compulsive loop has spread to other games in the genre.

Vampire Survivors belongs to a gaming niche that has become more notable these past few years: the lunch break game. While you can certainly lose track of an evening overdosing on a survivor-like, the genre is built for punchy runs that grab your attention, challenge your reflexes, and get you out in time to get back to your busy workday.
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As for those other games? Perhaps the most recommended game aside from Vampire Survivors itself is Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, which allows you to dig a path through rocky terrain and features more resources to juggle. There's also Karate Survivor, which replaces the whips and garlic with the fisticuffs and roundhouse kicks of '80s Hong Kong cinema. The cartoony Brotato is another survivor-like with verve and style, and looks like it was ripped straight from Newgrounds in the best possible way.

That said, while Vampire Survivors may have invented a genre, it's also the best game in that genre, and worthy of your attention. Developer Poncle has added plenty of DLC for you to check out, including an official collaboration with its stylistic progenitor Castlevania. Once you dip your toe in, you'll almost certainly be hooked for weeks.

You can find Vampire Survivors and its various DLC packs here on Epic Games Store.