Granny's Rampage Hits Steam June 22

Somewhere around the forty-hour mark of playing Vampire Survivors for the third time in a year, I started thinking about grandmothers. Not in a weird way. In a "what if the character mowing down ten thousand bats wasn't a brooding medieval knight but a seventy-year-old woman who found a minigun in her garage and decided the demons in her cul-de-sac were a zoning violation" way.

That thought became Granny's Rampage. It launches on Steam June 22. $2.99. Windows. And if you're the impatient type, it's already on itch.io right now for the same price. It's also already on Google Play for the same $2.99 if you'd rather play on your phone.

The Genre That Ate Indie Gaming

Quick context for anyone who got here through a search result and doesn't know what a bullet heaven is yet.

Bullet hell has been around since Japanese arcades in the '90s. Touhou, Ikaruga, the entire Cave catalog. Screens full of enemy projectiles arranged in gorgeous, lethal patterns. Your hitbox is one pixel. You dodge through gaps that shouldn't exist. You die constantly. You love it. The genre spent decades as a beautiful, punishing niche for people with preternatural reflexes and a complicated relationship with the word "fun."

Then Vampire Survivors showed up in 2022 and asked a rude question: what if the player was the one filling the screen with bullets instead? What if the weapons fired themselves? What if, instead of precision dodging, the whole thing was about picking upgrades that synergize until your character becomes a walking apocalypse? poncle built it alone, charged $3, sold millions of copies. The genre it kicked off got called "bullet heaven" because gamers will name anything.

The floodgates opened. Brotato gave you six weapons on a potato and shop breaks between waves. Halls of Torment dragged in Diablo's gothic atmosphere and enough dodge-or-die mechanics that it nearly circled back to actual bullet hell. 20 Minutes Till Dawn handed you mouse aiming and said "yeah, actually, skill should matter." Each game found a different thing to change about the Vampire Survivors formula, and each one worked, which told the rest of us that the formula's bones were strong enough to build on.

So we built on them. With a grandmother.

Meet Granny

She's wearing a housecoat. She has opinions about the demon squirrels (too loud, too flammable, shouldn't be in a residential area). She has a minigun she found in circumstances the game does not explain and she does not feel obligated to justify. She checks her watch during idle animations. She calls the Hellfather rude things in subtitles when she takes damage. She is not interested in being rescued.

Five stages. Suburban hell, then progressively more actual hell. Each stage has its own enemy roster, its own music (original soundtrack, every track), and a boss at the end who has to die before Granny moves on to the next bad day. The structure matters because it's the main thing we changed from the Vampire Survivors template. Most bullet heavens are one arena, one long escalation, one twenty-minute endurance test against a climbing difficulty curve. We wanted each stage to feel like walking into a different room of the same nightmare. Different enemies, different music, different strategies required. The Hellfather at the end of stage five is the final exam, and your build either passes or it doesn't.

About the enemies. Zombies are standard, the warm-up horde, the ones that exist so your minigun has something to chew on while you learn how the upgrade menu works. Demon squirrels are irritating in the specific way real squirrels are irritating, except these ones are on fire and they move in packs. Possessed Karens arrive by minivan. The minivan crashes into the stage. It's exactly as ridiculous as you're imagining. We almost cut it three times and then a playtester laughed at it so hard she had to pause the game, and that was the end of that conversation. Flaming hell knights are the straight-faced threat, the ones that make everything else funnier by contrast, the ones that remind you this is still a game where you can die.

The Build, the Weapons, the Part Where You Become Absurd

Minigun is your starter. Granny found it. She's keeping it.

Boss kills unlock new weapons. The chainsword is melee crowd control and exactly as indulgent as it sounds. The flamethrower is sustained area denial for when the squirrels get ideas about flanking. Every weapon has its own animation, its own upgrade path, its own reason to exist in Granny's increasingly concerning arsenal.

Five passive upgrade paths branch off the level-up system. Damage, range, pickups, survivability, chaos. "Chaos" is the one that makes the screen harder to read and the dopamine hit stronger. Speed boost gems drop from dead enemies and keep the momentum climbing through each stage so you never hit that mid-run plateau where you're walking in circles waiting for the next wave to reach you.

The enrage mechanic kicks in at 20% health. Granny hits harder when she's hurt. This is either a lifeline or a death sentence depending on whether you built for survivability or went all-in on damage and are now discovering the consequences. Both outcomes are funny.

Three difficulty settings. Easy is legitimate, no asterisk, play it if you want to relax. Medium is the intended experience. Hard is for the people who grew up dodging Touhou patterns and think auto-fire weapons are an insult to their ancestors.

Twenty to thirty minutes per run. Enough time to feel a build come together. Not enough time to feel robbed when a boss catches you.

The Vampire Survivors Question

People are going to ask, so: yes, obviously. The auto-fire weapons, the experience gems, the upgrade-on-level-up structure, the horde survival loop. Vampire Survivors is the reason this genre exists and Granny's Rampage would not exist without it. We're not going to pretend we invented something.

What we tried to add was the thing Vampire Survivors deliberately left out. poncle made a specific, smart design choice: one arena, infinite scaling, pure endurance. The genius of that choice is that the game never has to teach you a new enemy or a new environment. The complexity comes entirely from your build interacting with increasing density.

We went the other direction. Five stages, five different enemy mixes, five bosses. More authored content, less infinite scaling. More variety per run, less "how long can you survive." Whether that trade-off appeals to you is a taste question, and both answers are right. Ours just has a grandmother and a possessed minivan.

Try the Free One First, If You Want

Granny's Gambit is our other game. Same grandmother, completely different everything else. Victorian deckbuilder roguelike. Knitting needles, doily shields, a haunted manor where the furniture has opinions about you being there. Thirteen unique cards. A mercy system because Granny believes in fair fights even when the cursed servants don't.

Pay-what-you-want on itch, free if you want it free. If you're wondering whether you like how we make games before spending $2.99 on Rampage, Gambit is the audition. Different genre, same energy, same grandmother who does not have time for your nonsense.

Both games come from SB Choost, our solo label, under the Choost Games umbrella. We write about bullet heavens and the broader bullet hell/heaven landscape more than any reasonable studio should. The blog's there if you want it.

The Facts

Game: Granny's Rampage Developer: SB Choost Publisher: Choost Games Genre: Bullet heaven, action, roguelite Price: $2.99 Platforms: Windows (itch.io now, Steam June 22) + Android (Google Play now) Specs: Windows 10+, i3-6100 / Ryzen 3 1200, 4GB RAM, Intel HD 4000, 500MB disk Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/4656540/Grannys_Rampage/

Pre-launch wishlists are how Steam decides which indie games people see on release day. The algorithm is surprisingly transparent about this. If the premise sounds like your kind of evening, the wishlist is the thing that actually helps a $2.99 game find the people who'd enjoy it.

Granny's on the porch. The Hellfather has been warned. June 22.