How to play Vampire Feast

By the Vampire Feast team at Orivexsystems · Updated July 28, 2026

Vampire Feast is a free browser .io game where you play a vampire that grows by drinking blood. You move with the mouse, attack with the left mouse button, and dive with Space. Devour essence and rival vampires to gain mass, evolve through ten forms, and — if you reach the top — take the Crimson Throne and survive an entire server hunting your crown.

Controls

On mobile: drag anywhere to move and use the thumb buttons — 🦷 attack, 🦇 pounce, 🩸 feed, 📍 coven ping. Vampire Feast is built for phones as well as desktop; there is nothing to install.

The core loop: feed, grow, evolve

Everything in Vampire Feast is measured in mass. You gain it three ways, in ascending order of both reward and risk:

1. Essence — the drifting motes scattered across the 9,000-unit map. Safe, slow, and how every run starts.
2. Mortals and holy soldiers — the villagers and the Cathedral's knights, monks and paladins. Far richer than essence, but the Cathedral pays less the harder you farm it: repeatedly grinding the same NPCs tapers your payout to a fifth. Blood taken from players is never taxed.
3. Other vampires — the real economy. A player kill pays a 25% bonus on their mass and grants six seconds of frenzy. Hunting other players is the fastest way to grow, and the game is tuned to say so.

Cross a mass threshold and you evolve — a new body, a new signature power, more reach and more damage. The full ladder is in the vampire evolution guide, from the 28-mass Fledgling Bat to the 2,100-mass Dread Progenitor.

Shadow Pounce — the skill move

Tap Space and you commit to a ~290-pixel lunge with a few frames of invulnerability. It does three jobs:

• Devour — overlap something smaller than you mid-pounce and you simply eat it.
• Latch-bite — hit something bigger and you sink in instead, slowing them and draining.
• Backstab — land the pounce from behind and it hits for 1.8x. A well-flanked backstab can flip a fight against a bigger rival: the bite shrinks them while the lifesteal grows you.

The invulnerability window also makes it an escape. Diving through an attacker is often safer than running from one, because size is speed in reverse — you cannot outrun anything smaller than you.

Day, night and the Holy Order

The arena runs a day/night cycle. Night is yours: the essence is thick and the mortals are unguarded. Day belongs to the Cathedral, whose 7 unit types — knight, monk, paladin, crusader, angel, plus the roaming Named Hunter and the Grand Inquisitor — push out in waves every 24 seconds while a King reigns. Most nights also roll an omen: Red Rain showers essence from the sky, the Witching Hour halves every cooldown, Hunter's Moon doubles bounties, and the Starless Dark hides every name on the map.

Bounties and the Most Wanted

Kill players and a price goes on your head — 70 mass per kill, up to 1,600. Pass the threshold and you become the server's Most Wanted: your name is broadcast, and both players and bots will break off what they were doing to come for you. Claiming a bounty pays the slayer a large share of it. The lesson is simple — a killing spree funds everybody who beats you.

Your first five minutes: a checklist

1. Eat essence at the edges of the map. Do not go near the Cathedral under 100 mass.
2. Get to 75 mass (Ghoul) before picking any fight — the bleed is your first real weapon.
3. Hunt down, never up: prey noticeably smaller than you, ideally cornered against a map edge.
4. Use Shadow Pounce to escape as often as to attack. Dying at 400 mass costs you everything.
5. Watch the minimap. A crown icon means a King reigns — and that the Holy Order is already marching.

Ready for the deeper game? Read the Crimson King and Holy Order guide, or go straight to tips and strategy.