Back in 2022, Vampire Survivors hooked many, many players in not only with its borderline overstimulating casino-style visuals, but with its simple premise: focus on moving around and selecting upgrades, and the game will do the rest. Though Vampire Survivors was not necessarily the first in the bullet-heaven genre, it did so well that it caused its own genre to often be referred to by its namesake. And thus, we have the Survivor-like, which has spawned many more of its type in recent years, such as Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, Megabonk, and the recently updated, Overwhelming Positive rated Brotato. Fans of the game will be delighted to know that today, developers Blobfish and Evil Empire announced that they’re releasing an open-beta for the game’s next major content update “Paws & Claws.”
The summary for the update on Steam is short and sweet, but details some exciting new content that anyone can play while the developers polish it up. Brotato is a top-down 2D experience that pits you against waves and waves of aliens as a character variant of a potato, each of which has their own specialization you can build them around using the item shop, and the Paws & Claws update revolves around the addition of the Beast Master character and the item set they focus on, Pets. Pets act like “turrets with more personality” as the developers joke, and will loyally defend you from all the ugly-cute aliens on the level. There’s eight diverse pets pictured on the announcement page ranging from dogs to robots, but one in particular looks really interesting; Scapegoat. Its description says it will run around and have enemies target it instead of you, which isn’t something that’s been seen in the game before, as banal as that may sound. Still, that’s a fresh gameplay mechanic that’s coming to the game completely for free, among other quality of life features and fixes–chief among them being a timeline to view the current wave’s progress, and a more detailed enemy codex. To reiterate, the update is not fully out yet, but anyone who owns the game can access the update beta branch by following the developer’s instructions on the announcement page.