Blood Dungeon review: Messhof turns the Vampire Survivors formula into a wall-climbing platformer
The team behind Nidhogg has taken a tired genre and given it a fresh coat of blood. Blood Dungeon, the latest from developer and publisher Messhof, transforms the autoshooter or 'bullet heaven' format into a sidescrolling platformer where characters can climb walls and ceilings. It launches on Steam on August 26, 2026, and early impressions suggest it might be one of the best takes on the Survivors-like formula yet.
At its core, Blood Dungeon follows the familiar loop of Vampire Survivors: you move through an arena while your character automatically fires projectiles at waves of enemies, collecting XP from kills to level up and choose between randomised perks. Rounds typically last under ten minutes. What sets it apart is the shift from a top-down perspective to a 2D platformer that looks more like Spelunky than Brotato or Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. Your character can stick to any surface, allowing you to crawl along walls and ceilings, hugging them like a caterpillar on cocaine. This added mobility means you're not just balancing upgrades that scale with survivability; you're also considering which perks make it easier to navigate 2D mazes and dodge the increasing hordes.
The presentation is a major draw. Blood Dungeon features the distinctive globular 2D art style of designer Mark Essen, best known for his work on Nidhogg and Fly Wrench. The lo-fi doodle aesthetic exudes a combination of whimsy and irreverence. One character is nude with censor bars across their body and moves only by doing cartwheels. A machine gun icon looks very much like a dick and balls. One of the bosses, a giant worm, is right out of Nidhogg. The soundtrack by Thomas Hoey, who also composed the music for Wheel World, fills each dungeon with its own unique, trance-like vibe, which its creator Matthew Hoey aptly describes as dungeon drum 'n' bass.
The gameplay loop is built around collecting blood from slain enemies to unlock upgrades. There are over 100 auto-firing upgrades, over 100 enemies, and over 100 quests to complete. You can unlock nine characters and six dungeons, each with its own theme and design—one takes you underwater while another is an endless well. The enemies inside and the locations of certain upgrades are randomised for each run. Upgrades range from laser beams and spinning swords to rare charms that freeze or zombify enemies. Basketball weapons bounce between walls, and spiderweb guns shoot webs you can use to climb in midair. The reviewer's favourite weapon is the bouncing ball, which can demolish most of the game's first bosses within seconds if focused on upgrading it.
The progression system is typical of roguelites. You start as Gun Man, a character with a piddling machinegun that shoots every 1.21 seconds. Within a minute, the blood left by fallen enemies allows you to upgrade it to shoot twice, and thirty seconds later you can acquire a sword that rotates around your body. By the time you die, you may have four double-sized swords surrounding you, a gun that issues five bullets per round virtually non-stop, and the halls have turned into impenetrable walls of monster flesh. After five hours you can unlock other characters, all six maps, and upgrade health, jump height, damage output, and the number of weapons you can equip per run. If you're lucky, your character will be lost among an overwhelming array of erupting firepower by the eighth minute.
The reviewer from PC Gamer notes that while Blood Dungeon is a sleek, well-wrought take on the subgenre and probably among the best examples of it, the hours spent with it started to feel exquisitely meaningless, echoing why they dropped Vampire Survivors. The Kotaku reviewer, however, found it deeply addictive, burning their kid's pancakes while playing way too much of it. They describe it as a chaotic bullet-heaven platformer that makes you work hard for your rewards rather than letting you just sit back as optimally managed RNG runs its course, calling it their favourite of the genre yet.
Blood Dungeon has been tested on a laptop with an RTX 3060, Ryzen 5 5600H, and 16GB RAM. Its Steam Deck compatibility is officially listed as "unknown," but the reviewer reports it works great. The game is developed and published by Messhof, the studio behind Nidhogg, Fly Wrench, and last year's Wheel World. It launches on Steam on August 26, 2026, with pricing yet to be confirmed.