Vampire Survivors: The £1,100 Game That Invented 'Bullet Heaven'

You do not press attack in Vampire Survivors. You walk. Your character fires on its own, the screen fills with bats, skeletons and things with too many eyes, and your only job is to steer through the chaos while the numbers climb. It sounds like a joke design. It became one of the most influential games of the 2020s.

Vampire Survivors was made by Luca Galante, an Italian developer working under the name poncle. It entered Steam early access in December 2021, reached 1.0 on 20 October 2022, and in 2023 won Best Game and Game Design at the BAFTA Games Awards, beating far bigger productions. Along the way it gave a name to an entire genre, "bullet heaven", and inspired dozens of games built in its image.

From slot machines to vampires

Galante's background is the most surprising part of the story. Before games, he worked in the gambling industry, and he used what he knew about slot-machine graphics to design Vampire Survivors' treasure-chest animations, the glittering, coin-showering moment that makes opening a chest feel absurdly good.

He was unemployed when he started the project in 2020. His inspirations were a 2019 mobile game called Magic Survival, which featured a character that attacks automatically, and the Castlevania series, whose gothic look and whip-cracking heroes are obvious in Vampire Survivors' early sprites.

Long before any of this, Galante had another unusual line on his CV: he had been an administrator on a server for Ultima Online, the pioneering 1990s online role-playing game. Running a game for other people, rather than just playing it, is a habit that shows in how quickly Vampire Survivors grew and changed once players arrived.

The first version went up on itch.io and barely registered. Galante kept going. The early access build took about a year to make and cost roughly £1,100 in assets, art and music. He put it on Steam at a very low price in late 2021.

Then YouTube found it. In early 2022, video creators started posting runs, and the game exploded. It passed 30,000 concurrent Steam players in late January 2022 and more than 70,000 the following month, extraordinary numbers for a game made by one person for about the price of a used laptop. In February 2022, Galante quit his job to work on it full time, and in March he began hiring freelancers and planning a move to a more standard engine.

Everywhere, for almost nothing

Vampire Survivors' business model is as unusual as its design. It is sold as a cheap premium game on PC and consoles, and is free-to-play with ads on phones. The rollout was relentless:

• Windows and macOS: 20 October 2022 (1.0)
• Xbox One and Series X|S: 10 November 2022
• Android and iOS: 8 December 2022
• Nintendo Switch: 17 August 2023
• PlayStation 4 and 5: 29 August 2024
• Meta Quest (VR): 13 November 2025

Few indie games have been ported this widely, and fewer still while staying this cheap; the strategy turned a PC curiosity into something you could find on almost any screen in the house. It even ran on Tesla cars from September 2023. Cross-saves across most platforms arrived in April 2025, and full online co-op landed in October 2025.

The mobile release was rushed for a reason worth knowing: clones using stolen code and assets had appeared on app stores, so poncle fast-tracked an official version to get there first.

A genre named after it

Before 2022, "auto-attacking survival roguelike" was a mouthful nobody needed. After Vampire Survivors, players started calling these games bullet heaven, a cheeky reversal of "bullet hell": instead of dodging a screen full of enemy shots, you are the one filling the screen. Games such as Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and HoloCure followed in its wake, and poncle itself licensed its name and engine for Warhammer Survivors.

Why does it work so well? In our view, it is the rhythm. The first minutes of a run are almost boring: one weapon, a trickle of enemies. Then the upgrades compound. Weapons evolve into stronger forms, passive items stack, and by the end you are a walking firework display, barely able to see your own character. The game gives you nearly total control over your build and almost none over your attacks, and that strange split turns out to be deeply relaxing. You make a handful of interesting choices, then watch them pay off.

It is also a game designed for the way many people play now: in short sessions, on a handheld, half-watching something else. Vampire Survivors runs on almost anything, and critics singled out how well it plays on Steam Deck.

The critics were on board too. Vampire Survivors holds Metacritic scores of 86 on PC and 95 on Xbox Series X|S, and collected awards across both sides of the Atlantic:

• BAFTA Games Awards 2023: Best Game and Game Design
• BAFTA Games Awards 2025: Evolving Game
• D.I.C.E. Awards 2023: Action Game of the Year
• Golden Joystick Awards 2022: Breakthrough Award
• The Game Awards 2022: nominated for Best Debut Indie Game

The Castlevania circle closes

For a game so openly inspired by Castlevania, the biggest DLC was a homecoming. Ode to Castlevania, released on 31 October 2024, is an official crossover with Konami's series and the largest expansion poncle has made: 80 characters at launch, 16 more added later, and over 100 weapons. Galante called it a "full circle moment".

Other packs followed the same playful logic: Emergency Meeting with Among Us, Operation Guns with Contra, the free Emerald Diorama with SaGa: Emerald Beyond, and the free Ante Chamber, a Balatro tribute released in October 2025 (our Balatro feature). The latest paid pack, Legacy of the Bloodmoon, arrived on 28 August 2026.

Beyond the game

poncle has grown into something like a small entertainment company:

• Vampire Crawlers, a roguelike deckbuilder spin-off by Nosebleed Interactive, released on 21 April 2026.
• Poncle Presents, a publishing label founded in September 2024, released Berserk or Die and Kill the Brickman in 2025. By April 2026 it had paused new publishing to focus on small studios in Japan and Italy.
• An animated series announced in 2023 was reworked in January 2025 into a live-action film, still with Story Kitchen.
• A four-issue comic series from Titan Comics began in September 2026.

By the numbers

• ~£1,100: cost of assets, art and music for the early access version.
• 70,000+: concurrent Steam players reached in February 2022.
• 95: Metacritic score on Xbox Series X|S.
• 80: characters in Ode to Castlevania at launch.
• 2: BAFTA awards in 2023, plus a third in 2025.

What to play next

If Vampire Survivors has you hooked, try Brotato, a French solo developer's bullet-heaven hit starring a potato with six weapons (our story), or Balatro, whose jester shares Vampire Survivors' love of numbers going up. Vampire Survivors is on PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android and Meta Quest, and on phones it is free.