Games Like Vampire Survivors You Haven't Played Yet

You finished Vampire Survivors. You unlocked every character, evolved every weapon, found the secret stages, and now you're staring at your Steam library wondering what fills that specific hole in your brain. The one that wants you to walk in circles while numbers fly off the screen and dopamine floods your skull for thirty straight minutes.

Good news — the genre Vampire Survivors kicked off has exploded, and there are now hundreds of games chasing that same feeling. Bad news — most of them are forgettable clones that add nothing. The list below isn't most of them. These are the ones that took what Vampire Survivors built and pushed it somewhere genuinely new.

The Ones That Remix the Formula

Brotato is probably the closest thing to a must-play after Vampire Survivors itself. Instead of an open field with a timer, you get short arena rounds separated by shop visits. Your character can hold up to six weapons in floating arms, and the builds get ridiculous fast. A run takes maybe twenty minutes, which makes it perfect for squeezing in between other things. The co-op mode they added is great, and the expansion pack went deep on new content.

Halls of Torment looks like somebody dragged Diablo II's visual style into a bullet heaven and it works way better than it has any right to. The gothic atmosphere is a genuine differentiator in a genre dominated by cute pixel art. Combat leans more toward skill-based dodging than pure Vampire Survivors, and the build variety is serious — you're making meaningful choices about how your character functions, not just picking whatever upgrade has the biggest number.

20 Minutes Till Dawn answers the question "what if I could actually aim?" You move with WASD and aim with the mouse, turning it into a twin-stick shooter with survivors-like progression. That single change makes the skill ceiling dramatically higher. If Vampire Survivors ever felt too passive for you, this is the fix.

Death Must Die goes full action-RPG. The Diablo and Hades influence is obvious, but the bullet heaven structure holds it together. Gods bestow powers on you during runs, and the pixel art has a moody gothic quality that gives it real personality. It's one of the deeper games in the genre and rewards players who like theorycrafting builds.

The Weird Ones (Complimentary)

Boneraiser Minions replaces you with a necromancer who raises an army instead of attacking directly. You're managing a horde of your own skeletons and demons while enemies swarm in. The humor is extremely British and extremely dry. It's one of those games that screenshots terribly and plays brilliantly.

Luck Be a Landlord isn't technically a survivors-like at all — it's a slot machine roguelike. But it scratches the exact same itch. You spin slots, build synergies between symbols, and try to make enough money to pay rent. If what you actually loved about Vampire Survivors was the dopamine loop of combining upgrades into something overpowered, this game distills that feeling into pure slot-machine form.

Granny's Rampage takes the genre somewhere genuinely funny. You play as a grandmother armed with a minigun tearing through hellish landscapes across five stages, with boss fights, obstacle systems, and a sense of humor that runs through the whole thing. It's a bullet heaven that leans into absurdity and lands it. The kind of game that makes you text a screenshot to your friend because explaining it out loud sounds unhinged.

Soulstone Survivors pushes toward proper ARPG territory with a skill system that lets you customize abilities in granular ways. If you've ever wished a bullet heaven had the depth of Path of Exile's passive tree, this one gets closest.

The Polished Big-Budget Entries

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is what happens when a beloved franchise pivots into bullet heaven with a real budget and existing lore. The mining mechanic adds a resource-gathering layer that no other game in the genre has, and the production values are noticeably higher than most indie entries. The dwarves remain charming even in top-down form. It costs more than the typical $5 bullet heaven, but the depth justifies it.

Vampire Survivors' own DLCs deserve mention here because people genuinely sleep on them. The Castlevania crossover isn't just a skin pack — it adds entire new stages, characters, and weapon evolutions pulled from Konami's catalog. The Contra crossover does the same. If you burned out on the base game two years ago, loading it back up with the DLCs installed is almost like playing a sequel.

The Mobile Options

If you want this genre in your pocket, the landscape is surprisingly solid.

Survivor.io is the biggest mobile entry and it works because the touch controls map perfectly to the one-joystick movement that bullet heavens need. It's free-to-play with the usual mobile monetization baggage, but the core gameplay loop is genuine.

Vampire Survivors itself is on mobile now, and it's the same game — nothing stripped down, nothing paywalled. If you haven't tried it on your phone, it's honestly a great fit for the format.

The mobile side of this genre is still wide open compared to PC. Search for "bullet heaven mobile" and you'll find way less competition than the desktop scene, which means new entries have more room to get noticed.

What we make at Choost

We're a small indie studio. Our games: Granny's Rampage — a bullet heaven where grandma grabs a minigun and fights through hell — and Granny's Gambit, a Victorian deckbuilder roguelike starring a card-slinging nan with a chip on her shoulder. Granny's Rampage is $2.99 on itch (Windows) and Google Play (Android), with the Steam launch on June 22 (also $2.99). Granny's Gambit is pay-what-you-want on itch.

What Makes a Good Survivors-Like

After playing a lot of these, the pattern that separates the great ones from the forgettable ones is pretty clear. The good ones add a mechanical hook that changes how you think about runs — Brotato's shop system, Halls of Torment's dodge emphasis, 20 Minutes Till Dawn's aiming. The bad ones just reskin Vampire Survivors with a different theme and call it a day.

Build variety matters more than anything. The reason Vampire Survivors consumed your weekend wasn't the pixel art or the soundtrack. It was the moment you realized two items combine into something devastating and suddenly your brain is running optimization calculations at 2 AM. Every game on this list preserves that feeling. The ones that didn't make the cut are the ones where upgrades feel interchangeable and runs blur together.

The genre is still growing. Steam's Bullet Fest 2026 is happening this summer, and the community successfully pushed for an official "bullet heaven" tag on the platform. New games are coming out every month — from deckbuilder hybrids to 3D experiments to rhythm-game fusions. If you loved Vampire Survivors, there has never been a better time to explore what grew out of it.

The real question isn't whether there are games like Vampire Survivors. There are hundreds. The question is which ones respect your time enough to do something new with the formula. The ones above do.