Vampire Survivors Adds Cheat Menu In New Patch, Characters, And More Details

After using the cheats menu in the latest 0.10.0 update for Vampire Survivors to unlock certain items I had been stuck on, I sincerely wish more games had one.

If you haven’t heard of Vampire Survivors, it’s a fun game about leveling up and eliminating countless enemies in a single run. It’s kind of like a roguelike; you choose a beginning character with particular traits and a particular weapon and then level up that weapon, other weapons, and other stuff as you gather gems by beating foes. You only really need to care about gathering experience and stuff while avoiding enemies because your weapons fire automatically.

Late last year, the game was released on Steam under Early Access. Since then, it has received many updates that have added things like new characters, weapons, power-ups, stages, and special objects, albeit you normally have to meet specific prerequisites in order to access them. Although the game is a blast, it can be difficult and time-consuming to unlock everything. Despite having played Vampire Survivors for 40 hours, the in-game interface indicates that there are still 26 things I can unlock. I occasionally lose motivation when I see that secret menu and decide to play something else.

This demotivation may be greatly alleviated using the new cheats menu, which is known as the “Secrets” option in-game. It takes codes (also known as “spells”) to unlock characters, unique objects (also known as “relics”), and stages, so I can now decide what I want to unlock without using cheats. There are a few things that I just haven’t wanted to bother with, but thanks to this Secrets option, I can easily grab what I’m less interested in. I still want to unlock most things by truly meeting the requirements.

Vampire Survivors’ creators made a clever decision to additionally make the Secrets menu an unlockable in and of itself. Once you’ve mastered the game and unlocked a few other things, you’ll be able to find the object that unlocks it. If you’ve made it this far, I’d say that you can decide for yourself what to cheat for, and I wish other games would adopt the same philosophy.

While I adore the story of Death Stranding as I play it right now, the gameplay is incredibly slow. I wish I could hack a truck with unlimited health, battery, and some type of hover ability so I could simply make deliveries and finish the game’s story, but I doubt I’ll be able to do that without enduring hours of unpleasant traversing.

The spell to spin the user interface is available in Vampire Survivors’ Secrets menu, which I can respect for being goofy even though it doesn’t sound like much fun to use. The devs state that they are working on other spells in the 0.10.0 patch notes, so hopefully there will be more bizarre concepts in the future. I won’t reveal how to access the Secrets menu or which codes work for what, but if you’re interested, check out this GameFAQs tutorial.

Early Access for Vampire Survivors costs $3 on Steam. Although I haven’t been able to enter any cheat code spells on the handheld gaming PC, I had to punch them in on my MacBook Air. It normally works fairly well on Steam Deck, where it is one of the most played games on the site.