V Rising declares a 1.0 release date, climbing from the grave of a years-long early access to become your next time vampire

V Rising, a game that ah-ah-ah'd its way into a fairly successful early access in 2022, is finally hurling aside the stone lid of its early access tomb to suck away some more hours of your life.

A nifty isometric ARPG-slash-survival-game by Stunlock (previously known for Battlerite and, more unfortunately, Battlerite Royale), V Rising landed pretty well with audiences—selling a million copies in short order, then tripling that number by 2023. However, despite some major content updates, Dracula's castle has been a little quieter since.

That's only normal, though—no vampire lord reigns forever, and the double-edged sword of early access is that players will, generally speaking, finish up then go play something else. The game still has "Very Positive" reviews on Steam in both "Recent" and "All" categories at the time of writing.

As per the announcement on Steam, V Rising's 1.0 update will arrive May 8. The full release will feature a new endgame zone named The Ruins of Mortium, "a final chapter to cap off your Vampire journey", new bosses, fresh gear and—most importantly—better decorations to revamp your lair with, because what's an immortal being of the night to do with their long years, other than study interior design?

In terms of what you actually do, V Rising sees you clawing your way from a lowly ghoul to monarch of the damned, while also managing a homely little estate. As our online editor Fraser Brown put it in 2022: 

"I spent my first moments traipsing around the graveyard re-killing the undead, and then I moved to a forest where I fed on the living to fuel my awful unlife, murdered my way through hordes of warriors and poachers, started work on my ominous castle and made a lovely little blood altar."

It's a game that blends your typical survival stuff with Stunlock's reputation for top-down action combat—honed while developing the now-discontinued Bloodline Champions and  also-scuppered Battlerite. V Rising's had more staying power than both of those projects, and I'm glad to see Stunlock thoroughly sticking its landing, this time around.