Today, poncle announced that Balatro is officially coming to its hit independent roguelike shoot ’em up for free, titled Vampire Survivors: Ante Chamber.
Vampire Survivors: Ante Chamber is out now, and features four characters, four weapons with their respective evolution, a new stage, and a remix of the Balatro main theme. A new game mechanic, Survarots, is also available in the base game, and is a new form of power creep that is currently usable Secretino and all the Ante Chamber characters.
This is vaguely similar to Arcana cards, but they are themed after characters from Vampire Survivors and provide different types of bonuses. To unlock the content of Ante Chamber in game, find the special merchant in Moongolow and buy the Joker Disk for 50k gold coins, then proceed with the chain of unlocks that starts in the new stage.
Alongside the release of Vampire Survivors: Ante Chamber update 1.14 is also out, including new stages Westwoods and Mazerella, a relic that lets you play Party Mode (play with up to 4 characters at the same time), new playable characters, Darkanas, a Character Morph, and one new PowerUp. That is not all this update has to offer, as online co-op is now available:
- Batch level up – Depending on the player count you will only see level up after all players have leveled up. So on 4 players the level up screen will only show every 4 levels.
- DLC – You will only be able to use DLC online if every player owns that DLC. We’re retro-fitting Online into an originally single player game written in JS by a solo dev, so there are a lot of technical issues we have to move around or worry about later, one of which is the way that DLC expansions are handled.
- Free Roam – In online you are not restricted to the same screen, you can all freely move around the stage independently. (Note: You will be pulled into a boss room if any player walks into it)
- Spectator mode – When you die in multiplayer you can use the mouse to jump to players who are still alive. You also respawn where they are if you are spectating them.
- Achievements – You will have the choice at the end of the run to carry over any achievements earned in that run back into your own save file.
- Speed up – Disabled in online.
- Pause menu – To help flow, when you pause, you do not pause for everyone else, you just get a small window of invincibility
Vampire Survivors: The Ante Chamber update is free and available to download now via Steam, Android, iOS, PS4, and PS5. Meanwhile, Nintendo Switch and Epic Game Store users can access it on Halloween, October 31, 2025.
Alongside the DLC and co-op announcements, the recently released Ode to Castlevania update is also getting bigger, and there is no price change. The patch adds 16 new secret characters, three new weapons plus evos, 13 weapon unions, 12 music tracks, and one adventure. All you have to do to unlock this new content is go to the SECRETS menu after you have completed the main unlocks.
Lastly, the blog post also details that the next patch is arriving in Q1 of 2026 and that it will focus on quality-of-life improvements for Vampire Survivors. Primarily, the developers want to improve stability for late-game on-screen chaos, performance improvements for less powerful platforms, save slots (finally), and also adding in more content, like the two new special cards that are coming as soon as November 13, 2025.
You can see more about the rest of the 2025 plans and previously released DLC like Ode to Castlevania by searching Simulation Daily.
