It’s no secret that Vampire Survivors, the bullet hell roguelike surprise hit, was influenced heavily by the Castlevania franchise. The developers at Poncle are now honoring that inspiration with a huge DLC pack launching on October 31.
The Steam page for Ode to Castlevania is now live for wish-listing, but it’ll also be available on all platforms: Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Android and iOS.
The Ode to Castlevania DLC adds basically every Castlevania character to the game — or at least over 20 of them — and features more than 40 new weapons, a new stage, and around 30 soundtrack covers. It’s so big that Poncle has a small tip for players: don’t binge it all at once.
Best of all, it’ll only cost $4. Granted that’s only $1 less than the full game, but the DLC is so big that the developers said the pricing felt “fair.” The character additions alone more than double the amount you’ll get from the base game, not including secret characters and the dozens more that come with DLC. Vampire Survivors is overall one of the best games on the market in terms of bang for the buck, so even with the additional cost of the DLC, it’s an amazing deal.
Vampire Survivors has been compared to Castlevania quite a bit since it released in 2021. At the time, some said Poncle — which was once just developer Luca Galante — went too far, with sprites that were rip-offs. Galante told PC Gamer that he made sure not to straight-up copy Castlevania, but admitted that he got many of them from an asset pack. He then went and found artists to emulate the style and redo some of the offending sprites — although he left some stuff in.
“Vampire Survivors would have been a very different game hadn’t it been influenced by Castlevania in the first place, so this is straight-up the definition of a dream coming true,” said the developers in a post announcing the DLC. “This is not a standard DLC pack. This is a celebration of this historical game series, an incredible, full-circle moment in which we have invested all the energy we could muster, and then some!”
This isn’t the first time Vampire Survivors has teamed up with Castlevania developer Konami. Poncle released the Operation Guns DLC, which added Contra characters and weapons to the game.
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