If you ever thought Vampire Survivors was missing gore, lore, and buckwild nudity, then do I have a game for you

Give it enough time, and Vampire Survivors-likes (or ‘survivors’, which we here at PC Gamer are committed to making happen) will invent their way back to Diablo. We started with the sugary slot-machine loops of Vampire Survivors itself, progressed to the loot-driven meta-progression of Halls of Torment, which has all that stuff plus: activatable powers, a clearable world map, lore, and ludicrous nudity. The four key ingredients no truly great game can do without.

In essence, Conquest Dark is a familiar thing. You pick a class, mill around, kill enemies with automatic attacks, and accumulate XP. More XP leads to more powers, more stat buffs, faster and more damaging attacks, and all the while your enemies are increasing in ferocity, health, and number.

So far, so Vampire Survivors, and make no mistake, Conquest Dark isn’t a revolutionary reinvention of the genre. What it does, though, is add a bunch of tweaks and fine details around the edge of it that make the whole thing still feel pretty fresh. In place of other games’ it’s-gone-and-you’re-done health bar, Conquest Dark has a lives system. Hit zero health and your ‘lives’ meter will tick down, but you’ll also acquire a stack of bleeding.

That means that dying once puts you inexorably on a course towards dying forever. Bleeding, at least in my couple of hours with the game, can’t be easily cured. Even if you play perfectly after a death—avoiding every attack with a Diablo 4-style recharging dodge move—you’ll still be gushing blood out of one orifice or another. Maybe you can staunch it by choosing level-up abilities that buff your regen or make enemies more likely to drop health, but really, you’re just delaying the inevitable.

I kind of love it. It adds a skin-of-your-teeth urgency to any level that gets hairy enough for you to die on. Suddenly, your careful build-crafting goes out the window: now your focus is on adding more and more health buffs to try to stick it out until you’ve beaten each of the level’s bosses and run the timer down to zero. All the while a fountain of blood spewing out of your character increases in rage and intensity.

There’s a surprisingly robust gore system, too: as your character (and bosses, who also have lives) loses more and more lives, they lose more and more skin, until eventually they have a single life left and look like a tattered, bloody skeleton swinging a zweihander.

It’s a system that dovetails neatly with Conquest Dark’s structure—unlike Vampire Survivors or Halls of Torment, you’re not repeatedly running the same slim collection of levels to uncover secrets and gather loot. Instead, you’re proceeding across a Path-of-Exile-style map, proceeding from node to node with the aim of defeating each one’s bosses and vacuuming up the currencies they drop on death, and even building up your reputation with certain factions (which confers new, permanent bonuses) along the way.

It means there’s always a temptation—no matter how badly things are going and how doomed your character is—to tough things out to an end which is only just out of reach. More than once I found myself in a teeth-gritting race with a level’s final boss: each of us trying to whittle the other down to the end of their health bar before we inevitably succumbed to our own wounds.

It’s a worthy addition to the genre, and if you’re a fellow survivor sicko looking for your next fix, you could do much worse than Conquest Dark. You can find it over on Steam, where it releases in early access today.