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Virally popular action game Vampire Survivors has now spawned a fan game called HoloCure which has also exploded in popularity, to the point that its devs had to disable its overloaded leaderboards.
HoloCure, which is available for free via Itch.io, is mechanically similar to Vampire Survivors, though it also tips its hat to the mobile game Magic Survival. Basically, you walk around the screen hoovering up loot while your collected weapons and abilities automatically mulch up crowds of enemies. The key difference is that, instead of Castlevania-esque hunters and monsters, HoloCure stars several virtual YouTubers from the group Hololive, hence the name. There's also a gacha mechanic where you roll for different vtubers, but it costs in-game currency instead of real money.
Hololive is among the biggest names in vtubing, and its massive list of talents also includes YouTube's most-subscribed vtuber, Gawr Gura. On top of that, a quick YouTube search shows that Vampire Survivors was heavily played by many Hololive streamers, so there was definitely an audience to be found here – and HoloCure certainly found it.
"Due to the incredible amount of people playing, the scores data load has become too much for what we are able to keep up with and we have to restructure it in a future update," lead developer Kay Yu explained on Twitter after announcing that HoloCure's leaderboards would be temporarily turned off.
"We anticipated maybe a few thousand people to play, which seemed reasonable, but it turns out there are almost 50,000 downloads in less than 24 hours, and 20gbs worth of data downloaded from the scores database," they added.
HoloCure's dev team is quick to note that the game was made in compliance with guidelines set by Cover, the parent company over Hololive. The game certainly seems to have passed the company's standards, as multiple Hololive talents have already streamed it, often with tens of thousands watching.
This looks like one fan project that's not at risk of a takedown, and the team behind HoloCure is planning to add more characters and abilities in future updates.
"Our small team wants to focus on new content and bugfixing first and foremost at this time," the Itch.io page reads, noting that "there are no plans for a mobile version."
Vampire Survivors is now available on Xbox Game Pass, and don't sleep on it – it's one of the most elegantly designed games of the year.
