As autumn deepens and Halloween approaches, you might be feeling two seemingly incompatible things — the desire to cozy up at home and the desire to freak yourself out with horror games. Now on PlayStation Plus, one survival game lets you indulge both of those impulses at once with its mix of supernatural creatures and interior design.
V Rising launched its full version in 2024, after two years in Steam Early Access. It casts you as a newly awakened vampire struggling to establish a foothold in the world by building your own castle and slowly climbing the food chain by clearing your new home of threats. V Rising combines parts of the survival, action RPG, and base building genres, with a horror tinge that makes it great for spooky season without actually being too scary.
Things aren’t going great for you at the beginning of V Rising. You’ve just awoken as a vampire in the middle of the woods, and everything here is out to get you. And when I say everything, I’m hardly exaggerating, because on top of the wolves and vampire hunters out for your coagulated blood, the biggest threat you’ll face is the sun. Just staying in the sunlight for too long will cook you to a crisp, meaning the first thing you’ll want to do is find some shelter.
Eventually, the need to avoid a brutal sunburn will lead you to build a sprawling castle, but at least for your first day of vampire-hood, you’ll need to take what you can, which probably means just hoisting up a couple of wood planks and huddling under them for dear life. Despite being a vampire, you’re incredibly vulnerable at the beginning of V Rising, and a big part of its appeal comes from how satisfying it is to turn that dynamic around. Starting from a place of scrounging food and cowering in the daylight makes it all the more enjoyable when you’ve gotten strong enough to start raiding nearby villages and conquering new territory.
As for your castle itself, it’s a centerpiece of the game for good reason. The castle is where you’ll store the treasure you steal from nearby villages and gain new powers, but just as importantly, it’s where you can show off your unique style. Where some survival games make your base little more than shelter from the environment, your castle in V Castle is extremely customizable. You build the entire palace wall by wall, letting you arrange it in any shape you want, then decorate it with a huge number of items you gain as you get access to more materials. Designing your castle feels robust enough to be its own game, and since release, V Rising has even gotten a Castlevania DLC to add housing items from the classic vampire-slaying series if you want to build the kind of lair you would use to scheme against the Belmonts.
Decorating your throne room isn’t actually what V Rising is all about, though. The world is dotted with human settlements who’d much rather not have a vampire camping out just outside their walls, and other supernatural creatures have set up their own lairs nearby as well. To really control your own domain, you’ll need to do away with these nosy neighbors. Combat in V Rising somewhat resembles games like Diablo, but with a much slower and more deliberate pace. Rather than just clicking on demons until they explode, you’ll need to use a full suite of powers and weapons with much more strategy.
As you fight your way through your foes, you also need to remember to hydrate, by drinking the blood from creatures you encounter. At first, you’ll need to subsist on rat blood, but as you drain the life force of more powerful enemies, you’ll gain a portion of their power, which is a great incentive to keep on hunting increasingly dangerous foes lest you go back to snacking on wildlife.
Plenty of games cross genre lines to offer a bit of base building along with their action, but V Rising manages that mix better than most. The way combat and building play off each other gives you plenty of reason to pursue both, and even if you’d rather just build your castle, there’s plenty of appeal in ransacking towns so you can unlock a nice new rug for the foyer. With Halloween coming up, V Rising’s arrival is especially timely, putting you in the shoes of the monster instead of its prey.
