Megabonk, a 3D reimagining of Vampire Survivors that became one of 2025’s surprise hits, has somewhat belatedly released its Halloween update just in time for the winter holidays. But hey, Christmas has always been spook-adjacent, right? There’s A Christmas Carol, Krampus, A Charlie Brown Christmas…
“yoo I’ve finally finished the update I was working on,” said solo developer Vedinad in a post on Steam. “Was originally going to be a small halloween update, but I wanted to make it a bit bigger so it turned into a bit more work than I initially planned.” He goes on to list the new content added in the Spooky Update:
- New Map
- New Character
- New Weapon
- New Items
- New Enemies and Bosses
- New Achievements and challenges
Megabonk is an unabashed reinterpretation of Poncle’s Vampire Survivors, albeit with a few original twists of its own, not least that it’s now a 3D, third-person action game. It came out in September this year and absolutely exploded in popularity almost right away. And deservedly so! It’s a great game, even if most of its ideas aren’t entirely original. It also came out a couple of months ahead of Poncle announcing its own reinterpretation of Vampire Survivors as a 3D version of itself, although in that case it’s also being combined with a deckbuilding roguelite.
Alongside the new elements listed above, the Spooky Update also comes with a bunch of bug fixes, some new “advanced” settings for very niche tweaks, and a host of balancing changes. There’s also access to the game’s console, with the intention of making the game more open to speedrunning. And even this update has since received an update, fixing a few issues the spookiness introduced.
The game’s well worth checking out. A lot of people already have, to the degree that it was nominated in this year’s Best Debut Indie Game category at the Game Awards, before the pseudonymous developer withdraw it from consideration on the basis that it’s not really his first game. (Something the category’s eventual winners did not choose to do.)
