Sink your teeth into V Rising for free this weekend, and you can grab the full game for less than half price

You don’t need to be a music fan to have a vampire weekend this week, as toothy survival game V Rising is free on Steam for the next few days. Developer Stunlock Studios has announced that the game will be freely available until Monday, with a deep discount on the full version if you find yourself thirsting for more by the end of it.

If you’re unfamiliar with V Rising, it’s one of the better “survival game, but” experiences to have released in the last few years. It takes the familiar loop of exploring, resource gathering, base-building and so forth, but puts you in the role of a vampire looking to restore their former glory after centuries of slumber.

As you rebuild your vampire castle, you’ll need to pillage local villages and drink the blood of their inhabitants, and plan your resource runs carefully to avoid getting caught out in the sun.

While it has survivalist foundations, V-Rising is also a surprisingly adept action experience. It has a nimble combat system that uses keyboard controls and mouse-based aiming, and a whole bunch of weapons and spells to master. Its world also contains a variety of formidable boss fights who you can kill to absorb their powers.

It’s a combination that led Lewis Parker to give the game a score of 89% in his V Rising Review. “It’s a familiar formula—a little bit Valheim-with-vampires—but it stands out thanks to a progression system that’s wonderfully well-balanced and rewarding,” he wrote in 2024. “Boss fights feel tough but fair, and each unique enough to make every new encounter fresh and exciting. That’s pretty impressive considering there are 57 of them out there to hunt down.”

The free weekend coincides with the release of a new patch, which fixes a few bugs and adjusts the balance of V Rising’s PvP component. While Stunlock is confident that the game is “pretty solid” at this point, it wanted to address the “lack of variety” in PvP, and has made a few tweaks to discourage players from over-relying on certain tactics.

V Rising is free to download now. If you find its dark charms irresistible, the full game is on a 55% discount, bringing the price down to $19 (£16). And if you really like it, its six DLC packs are 20% off too. Those discounts end May 21. All told, it should keep you busy until Stunlock releases its next game, which is in active development and will continue “the odyssey of the Vampire.”