2024 is the year that Konami remembered that they used to make video games, and I’m here for it.

Not only did they release an apparently surprisingly good Silent Hill 2 remake. Not only are they toiling away at a pretty-good-looking Metal Gear Solid 3 remake. They also collaborated with a tiny studio to make not one, but two awesome pieces of retro-themed DLC.

Vampire Survivors: Ode to Castlevania launched back on Halloween, and I first played some of it over Steam Remote Play Together with a friend in the co-op mode. The Steam streaming platform is absolutely not the best way to play this game, as even the most mighty video compressor in the world would struggle to process all the intense visuals and graphics happening at all times in the game. Still, even that small and slightly sub par taste had me hooked on the new content.

Ode builds upon the excellent large foundation of the base game. It’s still a top-down-perspective 2D game about running around a large playfield and auto-attacking thousands of enemies with a plethora of upgradeable weapons. However, where the core game used a lot of artwork that was very similar to real Castlevania characters, this new DLC finally grants the game official access to the enemies, heroes, and yes, Vampires that it so desperately wanted to make use of without getting into legal trouble.

It’s super cool to see real Castlevania characters running around in this game that traded for so many years on a similar vibe and art style. Just as in the main game, you’ll have to unlock all the playable heroes by making your way through a large map and finding coffins, or sometimes by completing other conditions listed in the menu. The characters come alongside new weapons, too, which is impressive considering that the main collection of weapons in the original game was already pretty Castlevania-like.

Just like the Contra pack from earlier this year, and some of the earlier story-based DLC work, the Castlevania map has actual real level design. I know that’s a weird thing to say about a video game, but Vampire Survivors started out with large play fields that kind of just endlessly generated in different directions. If you like that sort of map, you can take any of the unlocked Castlevania characters back into the older realms, but I think the new map is very cool. It’s built kind of like a modern Castlevania game, with a progression that takes you through an outdoor area and then into a labyrinthine castle. You have to battle bosses and collect keys that unlock teleporters, which then allow you to warp further into the map at the start of your next run.

Even wilder, some areas of the map switch the perspective—kind of. The artwork doesn’t change, but certain areas play more like a traditional side-view 2D pixel art game…complete with jumping. The platforming is some of the most hilarious and janky gameplay I’ve ever experienced in a video game. Basically, your character will stick to a particular surface, and then whenever you press up on your controls, they’ll flip awkwardly into the air, rotate, and come back down again. It’s super weird-looking and fully hilarious.

In addition to the official pixel art, the game also has a ton of new spins on classic Castlevania music tracks. This is the one potential weak point, design-wise. The music gets locked into one track for your entire run, more or less, so you’ll probably get tired of it after a few minutes. There’s also no way to pick your own music track, at least at first. If you’ve been playing the game for a while, you may have collected a special item that lets you manually select your favorite music track, and that’s vital to go and find if you want to hear all of the cool new music in this pack.

Unlike some other recently award-nominated DLC pack, you can access the Castlevania DLC from the second you fire up the game. I think this should be the norm for all games, honestly–even when it doesn’t make a ton of narrative sense. DLC is a chance to open your game up to a new audience. New customers will always pay attention when a game is re-marketed, and I think that expanded packs which only cater to the most hardcore fans have inherently limited appeal. That’s “better” for those fans I guess, but it’s also part of why the gaming industry has hit so many growth hurdles in the last few years.

Vampire Survivors takes a clever approach to this, letting you access the new map but not the new characters right away. So you can take in a favorite build from the base game, then get the joy of unlocking new stuff all over again. Or if you’re brand new to the game, you can jump right to the thing that you wanted to see in the flashy new trailer. Good stuff.

The Ode to Castlevania is available on all the same platforms as the main game–which is basically every device that will play a current video game. It’s on phones, PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, and PC. It’s also super cheap for the amount of content it contains at four dollars.

If The Game Awards has its weird little marketing-driven heart set on allowing DLC packs into their Game of the Year contention, I wish this one had made the cut. It represents a super cool moment for the base game, as it’s literally the perfect collaboration for a title that so desperately wanted to be a “real” Castlevania game for such a long time. Its elaborate map, wild platforming sequences,  and forty new weapons offer tons of new-feeling gameplay, while still hanging on to that compulsive hook that drives all the other parts of the game. For the price, it is indeed a very cool little ode to one of gaming’s best classic franchises, and it’s one of my favorite things released this year.

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