Voltaire: The Vegan Vampire is a strategic action game where you play a vegan vampire defending his way of life against a bloodthirsty family. By day you plant and nurture crops on your ever-expanding farm. By night you then use them, alongside magical abilities, spells, and upgrades, to defeat hordes of monsters. The unique loop of strategically planting the most useful crops for a geographical and tactical advantage makes for a novel twist on the tower defence game.

You play Voltaire, the youngest son of Count Dracula, who turns his back on a blood-sucking diet in favour of a plant-based one. Furious, your father banishes you from the house and sends his monstrous minions after you every night, hoping you bring you back to the proper vampire way of life. The game is split into two core sections: day and night. Every day, you expand your plant beds from a small vegetable patch with only a few species to a fully-fledged farm with countless varieties of plants offering different dietary benefits. By night, you must defend yourself and your farm from the monsters.

The day lasts as long as needed to plant your crops and explore the varied land for seeds and saplings, treasure chests. However, each action you take makes you more hungry, so you need to eat the food you grow to continue. There are additional quests you can discover that yield valuable rewards. There are also plants that grant special powers for the nighttime.

The night is a matter of survival, where you must defeat all enemies before they destroy your plants. As you progress, you upgrade your abilities, such as making plants grow faster, reducing the rate you grow hungry, and increasing the efficacy of your attacks. When you die, you go back to the previous day and choose whether to keep your abilities but lose your loot or vice versa, allowing you to experiment and approach the battle in different and ambitious ways.

The result is a mix of farming sim and tactical fights where inventing unusual ways to use your defensive and offensive powers is encouraged. Get it wrong and your farm suffers. But survive the night and you can slowly expand your farming operation with new plants, locations and structures, allowing you to become a more powerful defender.