Vampire Survivorsis an auto-shooter that has essentially defined a new sub-genre while also being a loving tribute to retro gaming. You can see this in everything from its pixelated presentation to its use of Castlevania monsters and weapons and an abundance of cryptic secrets and cheat codes.
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These take many forms, from tiny easter eggs to fully-fledged extra characters, recalling warm memories of your first steps into gaming as a pastime, where the promise of those virtual worlds stretches out as far as the horizons of your imagination.
8MissingNo And The Glitch Dimension
Glitches are a vital part of game history, with many providing some of our fondest memories from our childhood favourites. Vampire Survivors celebrates this fact by including MissingNo, a playable glitch whose stats, weapons, and appearance are randomised each time you select him for a run.
In order tounlock this character, you first need to survive the trials of the Glitch Dimension: a bizarre corruption of the Green Acres stage that occurs when you turn on both Hyper and Inverted Mode and rush into the lower-left of the stage. You’ll need to fight off giant eyeball enemies and keep your own eyeballs steady among the dazzling mish-mash of scenery and background effects, but if you’re able to, then MissingNo will be yours.
7Petting The Dog
Thanks to the viral Twitter account that catalogues which games allow you to do so, petting the dog in modern games has become awholesome ongoing trend. Vampire Survivors proudly joins in, allowing you to pet the playable dog character O’Sole Meeo.
To do so, you simply need to play as O’sole in any given stage and type “pet” on your keyboard at any point. Doing so will generate a ring of hearts, symbolising O’Sole’s delight at being petted, that zoom in to fully heal you up. This is a heartwarming little touch, but it actually has gameplay applications as well: fully healing yourself can come in handy to save O’Sole from an early check-in at dog heaven during a tight spot in a run.
6The Konami Code
Given how indebted Vampire Survivors is to the legendary Castlevania series for its visuals and character designs, it’s fitting that the Konami Code, an iconic series of inputs that granted players an advantage in a range of classic Konami games, including Castlevania, makes an appearance here. You can enter an adapted-for-keyboard version of the code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, escape, enter) on the main menu for a spooky surprise.
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The surprise in question is the character Mortaccio, a playable skeleton who would normally require you to defeat 3000 skeletons during runs before he reared his bony head. In addition, you also receive 2,00 Gold, enough to buy the first few characters in the game. If you’re not feeling like playing by the rules, the Konami Code can supercharge your early game in Vampire Survivors.
5Children Of The Corn
The Forbidden Scrolls of Morbane Relic, found in the depths of the Bone Zone,holds all manner of secrets, both in the form of cryptic hints and special codes you can enter to enact various effects on the game. These range from the expected, such as unlocking characters and stages early, to the bizarre, like dropping you into Green Acres within a circle of healing corn.
You can activate this strange effect by typing ‘popthecorn’ into the spell section of the Forbidden Scrolls. As mentioned above, the corn heals you when consumed, which can give you a minor edge if you ration it out over the run. Overall though, it’s more of a fun curio than anything else, perhaps intended to channel the innate horror of dense cornfields or the alien vibes of crop circles.
4Kappa Lake
During the Legacy of the Moonspell DLC, you’ll be tasked with slaying a total of 6,000 Kappa enemies in order to unlock the Gav’Et-Oni character. This may seem impossible during your first few runs, as Kappa don’t appear in the regular enemy waves for the Mt. Moonspell stage, but it’s actually a subtle way for the game to introduce the concept of region-specific enemies that debuted with this DLC.
If you head to the north-west section of the stage, you’ll find a frozen lake, guarded by a Goshadokuro mini-boss and an endless swarm of Kappa. You can hang around here for as long as you like, slowly racking up enough Kappa kills to unlock Gav’Et-Oni. It’s a cool secret area, and a nice way for Vampire Survivors to make its stages feel more like fully-designed levels rather than endlessly repeating sprite grids.
3The Inverted Library’s Hidden Piano
A piano-playing mini-game is probably the last thing you’d expect to find in a frantic top-down shooter like Vampire Survivors, but then again, its irreverent sense of humour and bizarre logic leave ample room for one. You’ll encounter this piano as part of the incredibly convoluted unlock process for Avatar Infernas, a quest that will see you grabbing specific weapons on a specific map in a specific mode just to reach the halfway point.
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Once you do, you’ll have to play a specific sequence of keys to proceed: a sequence spelled out by the two bird companions you’ll need to have picked up earlier on. If you hit all the right notes, you’ll be taken to a shadowy, coffin-filled lair, where you can finally hunt down and destroy the Avatar himself. While not exactly synergistic with the core gameplay, this is a fun puzzle that shows just how far Vampire Survivors is willing to go in terms of secrets.
2Overriding Item And Weapon Limits
A hidden mechanic that can give you a serious edge in your late-game runs, the ability to collect weapons and passive items even once you’ve filled up your 12 basic slots, is one of Vampire Survivors’ best-kept secrets. Simply put, while you can’t gain new weapons or items via levelling up once your core slots are full, you can gain them from other sources, such as stage items or the candybox weapon found in chests.
This means you can build a strategy around the items that naturally spawn in each stage. In the Mad Forest, for example, you cangrab six passive itemswhile levelling up, then collect the Clover, Pummarolo, Spinach, Hollow Heart, and Skull O’Maniac items that are lying around the stage, giving you five extra stat boosts on top of those you already have. This is a great way to push your characters to the limit.
1Halloween Party
Vampire Survivors is spooky enough for most people, with its cackling cast of classic movie monsters and near-inevitable death waiting in every stage. For those who want to ratchet up the fear even further, though, there’s a secret code you can enter in the Forbidden Scrolls of Morbane to do just that. The code in question is ‘spoopyseason.’
Once entered, you’ll be taken to the terrifying Bone Zone stage as either Mortaccio, Yatta Cavallo, Bianca Ramba, or O’Sole Meeo, each decked out in a unique Halloween costume skin. Their weapons will also receive a makeover, with Mortaccio tossing pumpkins and Bianca pushing carts loaded with bright-eyed skulls. Not only is this a great way to celebrate the spookiest day of the year, but it’s also a genuine challenge, given the low power level of thecharacters you’re givenand the monstrous challenge posed by the Bone Zone.
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