Voltaire: The Vegan Vampire

My first instinct with Voltaire: The Vegan Vampire was to map it against other games that blend farming sims with combat loops, and the comparison that kept surfacing was Plants vs Zombies stretched into three dimensions with a roguelite coat of paint slapped on top. The pitch is genuinely clever: you play Dracula's youngest son, a vegan rebel, who must farm crops by day to survive and then defend that same farm from Dracula's nightly minion waves. The structure splits neatly into two phases. During daylight, you plough plots, plant seeds, water them, and manage a hunger meter that drains with every action. At night, those same crops either feed you or fight for you, because two plant categories exist side by side: food plants like Crowberries and veggies that keep hunger down, and offensive plants like Vinemaws and Broodvines that pelt enemies with dark magic, fireballs, and caustic slime. Finding the split between food and firepower across your four garden plots is the game's central tension, and for the first couple of hours it works. The problem the community and most reviewers identify is that the difficulty curve collapses on itself. Early on, surviving a night feels genuinely precarious, especially when poorly managed hunger triggers the night cycle early and spawns tougher waves. Every seven nights a Grim Lord boss shows up, forces a harder fight, and then drops a portal to the next biome. Clearing a biome and moving to new territory should escalate pressure, but it largely does not. Once you learn that Crowberries can be upgraded to dramatically reduce hunger drain, the food management side becomes trivial, and once your XP-funded perk tree fills out, the combat side goes the same way. Steam reviewers note the difficulty swings from punishing at levels one and two to almost passive by level five, and that the upgrade system does not meaningfully counter-scale enemy strength. The roguelite label sits a bit awkwardly here too: in Story Mode, a destroyed house just resets the day rather than ending a run, which removes a lot of the tension that justifies the genre tag. On the structural side, the tutorial is delivered through letters from uncles Frank and Stein, which is light-touch and unobtrusive for newcomers. Controls are simple whether you are on a controller or keyboard, and local split-screen co-op is supported, mixing controller and keyboard inputs across two players. That co-op angle is probably the game's strongest selling point right now; the loop that gets repetitive solo becomes much more forgiving as a shared casual session. The art style is a genuine strength throughout: hand-drawn 2D sprites in an isometric 3D world, horror-comedy tone, and character designs that hold up across biomes. The soundtrack adds appropriate atmosphere without overstaying its welcome. What falls flat beyond the difficulty issues is the narrative. The story is surface-level by design, and while Frank and Stein deliver some genuinely funny puns via raven-mail, they are the only source of character interaction in the entire game. The Grim Lords that cap each biome are a missed opportunity for personality; most fight like slightly stronger regular enemies rather than distinct boss encounters with their own mechanics. The resource grind for crafting and the repetitive map traversal required to collect wood and seeds add padding that reviewers consistently flag as the session-killer. There is a skill tree and some cosmetic unlocks that technically support replayability, but without the difficulty to pressure-test different build choices, experimenting with perks loses urgency quickly. For a strategy or sim player like me, the decision space here is too thin to sustain interest past the initial setup. The food-vs-firepower crop split is a solid idea that never gets complicated enough to reward genuine optimization. If you are a casual player who wants a cozy-but-spooky session game to share with someone on the couch, the charm-to-effort ratio is reasonable. If you want a farming roguelite with the systemic depth of something like Hades or even Stardew Valley modded for challenge, this one will leave you hungry for substance well before Dracula sends his best.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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