Vampire Survivors got a great quality-of-life feature (and a secret novelty character)

With a new relic, you can now see the weapon evolution pairings right in the pause menu

Patch 0.7.3 for Vampire Survivors is out today, and you know what that means: more characters, weapons, relics, Arcanas, and achievements to unlock. I’ve never fought so hard to maintain 100 percent completion in a game, but that just goes to show how quickly these updates are coming. I grind and grind, and the developers grind right back.

This trailer is a nice hazy attention-grabber, and I’ve got specifics below.

Here’s a spoiler-filled rundown of what’s in patch 0.7.3, including the new secret character

Characters

• Sir Ambrojoe, who starts with the furniture-raining La Robba weapon.
  • How to unlock: Kill 6,000 Stage Killer enemies on Cappella Magna.
• Peppino, a slow-moving, area-of-effect-dealing tree. Yes, a tree.
  • How to unlock: Heal plants for 100,000 health on Ill Molise using O’Sole.

Relics

• Grim Grimoire — shows all currently known evolutions/unions in the pause menu.
  • How to unlock: Pick it up in the Inlaid Library near your spawn point.
• Mindbender — lets you change the appearance of characters in the selection menu, and lets you limit your active weapon slots (which pairs well with a new Arcana).
  • How to unlock: Complete 100 entries in the Collection.

Arcanas

• Tragic Princess (III) — reduces the cooldown of weapons while moving, including Garlic, Soul Eater, Santa Water, La Borra, Lightning Ring, Thunder Loop, and Carréllo.
  • How to unlock: Reach level 99 with Porta.
• Silent Old Sanctuary (XX) — grants +3 Reroll, Skip, and Banish, and provides +20% Might and -8% Cooldown for each of your empty active weapon slots.
  • How to unlock: Reach minute 31 in the Dairy Plant.

Tweaks and fixes

• Improved stats of Vento Sacro’s early levels.
• Added extra area coverage to Fuwalafuwaloo.
• Moved Magic Banger relic to Green Acres.
• Hurry mode also gives a 25% XP bonus.
• Added support for German and Brazilian-Portuguese.
• Tentative fix for standard saves not working on Steam Deck for some users.

After highlighting a fan-made evolution chart, it’s nice to see that in the game proper. I’m about 50 hours into Vampire Survivors and I still need to double-check some of them.

The Vampire Survivors team is growing

In a Steam post, the creator of Vampire Survivors, poncle, spoke about the growing team.

“We had a team for some time now, but I’m taking the opportunity to talk about it only now that one more developer, David, is finally joining me in working full time on the current version of the game. This doesn’t mean we’re going to reach version 1.0 of the game faster than expected, but it means we’ll be putting in the game even more features and be faster in polishing rough edges. One of the new relics from this patch, the Grim Grimoire, is a good example of what kind of extras to expect!”

There are also a few developers working on porting Vampire Survivors to an “industry-standard engine” without losing the game’s very particular look and feel.

They’re aiming to have “a version of Vampire Survivors that plays just like the current one, but that is free of hardware and controller compatibility issues and that performs well even when there is an unreasonable amount of projectiles and enemies on screen.”

If all goes well, that’ll be done this summer, but it’s ultimately “ready when it’s ready.”

“We might be getting close to the conclusion of Vampire Survivors, but for poncle that’s just the beginning.” On that note, I’m rooting so hard for a Nintendo Switch port.

I’m not joking around when I say that Vampire Survivors is one of my favorite games of 2022. No, really! It’s just so satisfying to cleave through hordes of pixelated baddies, and I love the sense of micro and macro progression. Individual game runs are inherently fun, as are the achievements/unlockables that push you to keep playing again and again.

It might not look like much, but that’s part of the charm.