In June, Poncle announced that the reverse bullet-hell game "Vampire Survivors" would finally get a couch co-op mode in August. And today, a surprise announcement of a new Steam-specific feature was made.

Overall, Vampire Survivors' co-op play is very simple. It is the same as the single-player mode, but with more people. Naturally, some concessions had to be made to accommodate the number of people, and they were made clear today on the Xbox News Wire: in co-op mode, each player must choose a different character. Poncle's senior marketing manager Gio Morgan explained, "If you have four Poe's, Orsol's, and Sigma's on screen, the universe simply collapses."

Weapons can be chosen at will, but the number of weapons one can carry depends on the number of people playing.

"This means that to maximize survival time, you have to decide who chooses which weapons, but to maximize chaos, you can close your eyes and choose anything!" Morgan said. Morgan said.

Players do not level up at the same time, but take turns. If one player dies, all XP earned goes to the next player; in co-op mode, death is not the end of the game. The player who dies becomes a coffin and will eventually be resurrected, as long as there are no enemies in the coffin. And just like in single-player mode, the action takes place on a single screen, so "you have to tactically agree with your teammates on where to go next and where on the map is the best place to fight. In some cases, this can lead to big arguments about it.

The couch co-op mode also features a unique new item, the ironically named "friendship amulet. This item appears on the level-up screen and allows each player to level up a random weapon. Players must decide whether to tactically (or selfishly) choose to level up their weapon of choice or give the entire group a random round of leveling up."

Vampire Survivor's couch co-op mode will go live on August 17. Ahead of that, that is, today, an update will be released to Steam, adding five Steam trading cards, six badges, five emoticons, and three profile backgrounds. The studio said that this is "just the first step" and will probably consider adding more items like this once the couch co-op update is finished.

Incidentally, Vampire Survivors does not support online play, but Poncle said when the mode was announced that it would work perfectly fine with Steam Remote Play Together. Also, although there is no official PvP mode, Morgan has announced that "if you think your friends are not properly committed to the 'cooperative' part of the game, there may be a few ways to get a little revenge."

As part of today's ID@Xbox showcase, IGN released 12 minutes of Vampire Survivors couch co-op gameplay footage. Watch it below.