What you need to know
- A game has appeared as coming in 2023 on Steam, and it looks pretty familiar.
- The casual rogue-lite game has you control a ship that never stops moving and has to dodge and destroy enemies.
- Sea of Survivors looks just like Vampire Survivors with a pirate theme akin to Sea of Thieves.
Vampire Survivors was a surprise hit of 2022 with its addictive gameplay and pixelated charm, and Sea of Thieves is still appealing to our pirate fantasies of sailing the high seas looking for booty — but what if you could combine these two games?
Well someone had that exact thought, enter Sea of Survivors, a rogue-lite adventure on the High Seas.
Published by Nah Yeah Games, Sea of Survivors is categorized on Steam as rogue-lite, bullet hell, pixel graphics, pirate and retro. Sounds great so far!
In the game, you play as the captain of a ship that never stops moving and must dodge and destroy waves of enemies and sea monsters. You can collect weapons, upgrades, curses and treasures to create a unique build every run. You also unlock new abilities, stages and crew members as you progress through the game, as this upgrade screen shows.
The game clips show that the ship moves forward constantly and you can only steer left or right, avoiding obstacles and projectiles while shooting back with your own weapons. You can also use special abilities such as bombs, shields and dashes to survive the onslaught.
The game features procedurally generated stages with different themes, enemies and bosses and each stage has a different objective, such as reaching a certain distance, destroying a certain number of enemies or surviving for a certain amount of time - similar to Vampire Survivors' achievements list but with its own unique pirate twist.
From the official gameplay trailer, it appears you can use experience points to level up and choose from three random upgrades that enhance your stats or abilities. You can use gold to buy more weapons and upgrades from shops that appear randomly in the stages. You can also find loot such as curses, treasures and relics that have positive or negative effects on your run.
The color palette is more limited than Vampire Survivors, and there's more rum than blood, but it's great to see more games with this style of gameplay loop being released, and this should be a fun title on the Steam Deck. We can't wait to set sail and try it out.
