If you play games on PC or own a Steam Deck, the time is now to pick up Vampire Survivors. The indie megahit is inching very close to its 1.0 release, but before that, the price is set to increase tomorrow, September 21st. Developer Poncle has not yet disclosed what the full price of the game will be, but it’s going to be higher than the current $2.99 you can get it for on Steam.
Vampire Survivors launched in Steam Early Access back in December, and it’s remained that cheap, even as it grew a huge following and the developers added much more content to it through frequent updates. It’s also available to subscribers of Microsoft’s PC Game Pass, but this is your last chance to get it on Steam for about the price of a cup of coffee.
If you aren’t too familiar with Vampire Survivors or why its fans never stop espousing how good of a value it is for an indie game, it’s a bullet hell-style rogue-lite where you try (and fail) to survive an onslaught of gothic enemies with a variety of unique unlockable characters. The graphics are all sprite-based, and your only control is the movement of your character with one analog stick. As the enemies grow in numbers and power, you level up and find more auto-firing power-ups to fend them off. It quickly escalates to a chaotic harmony of innumerable enemies and overpowered weapons with a euphoric “one more run!” hook — which is fitting since its creator Luca Galante used to do software development in the gambling industry.
Between my colleague Jay Peters and I, we have logged over 100 combined hours of playtime — though it’s not uncommon to hear of individual players doubling that on their own — and most of it has been on our respective Steam Decks. Vampire Survivors has found such an ideal home on Valve’s handheld console that it consistently ranks as one of the Deck’s top games by total hours played, even beating out AAA behemoths like Elden Ring and Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered. All that for $2.99 — for the rest of today, at least.