Vampire Survivors Dev Poncle Outlines Challenges of Film Adaptation: ‘The Game Has No Plot’

Vampire Survivors developer Poncle has outlined the difficulties behind its adaptation, which was originally announced as an animated series but now appears to be a film, headlined by the fact “the game has no plot.”

Poncle said it is “still working with Story Kitchen on a live action film” in a Steam post despite the adaptation being announced as an animated series in 2023. Regardless, Poncle has now acknowledged just how difficult it will be to get a film right, especially as Vampire Survivors is a mechanically simple action game about defeating hoards of enemies.

“As mentioned last year, rather than jumping the gun and make stuff for the sake of making it, we have preferred to wait to find partners that felt right, especially because to make anything that isn’t a video game out of Vampire Survivors requires good ideas, creativity, and that quirky knowledge of the game,” Poncle said.

“That is a very difficult triplet to get 100% right. Please remember the game has no plot — it doesn’t? — so nobody can really anticipate how a film about it is going to be. That is part of what makes it exciting.”

The irony of this wasn’t lost on Poncle upon the adaptation’s announcement, saying, sarcastically, “the most important thing in Vampire Survivors is the story.” It’s unclear how the game will be adapted, even to Poncle, so a release date hasn’t been announced as of yet.

Vampire Survivors is a fast-paced and over-the-top gothic horror game with rogue-lite elements, where your choices can allow you to quickly snowball against the hundreds of monsters that get thrown at you. It became one of the biggest surprise hits of the last few years as what launched as a humble indie game on Steam blew up in popularity and snowballed itself.

Poncle soon added layers of new content to the game and the core experience now offers 50 playable characters and 80 weapons to play with. That’s before the two major expansions too, not to mention the Ode to Castlevania DLC.

In our 8/10 review, IGN said: “Need a game to play while listening to podcasts? This is it. Vampire Survivors is outwardly simple but turns out to be an incredibly deep hole to fall down — though it’s not without extended dull periods when you get ahead of its curve.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.