Brotato’s Back With Primal Dread DLC and a Major Update

There are mountain goats, billy goats, and goats that spend their days wandering around barnyards. But have you ever heard of the Bullet Heaven GOAT?

With over 40 hours invested in Brotato, I speak somewhat from experience. Alongside Vampire Survivors, Brotato is one of the early greats of the bullet heaven genre. Its simple premise, addictive gameplay, and often punishing difficulty have kept me coming back over the years. I’ll admit I haven’t won too many runs, but I’ve managed to unlock a fair number of characters. When the Primal Dread DLC was announced, I was excited for its release. Today, that day finally arrived, and I can already tell it was money well spent.

Alongside the DLC, Brotato received a free update to version 1.2.0.0. The update introduces Item Sets, which let players enable or disable content from expansions and free updates. It also includes balance adjustments for Nightmare difficulty, improvements to existing characters, and several fixes. This also marks the first paid expansion since Evil Empire took over Brotato’s development from Blobfish in September 2025. Blobfish remains involved in overseeing the game’s direction.

Primal Dread introduces a prehistoric jungle, dinosaurs, new characters, weapons, items, and an Evolution system. I’m no Jurassic Park fanatic. Sure, I’ve seen the movies, but I can take them or leave them. I’m not here for the dinosaurs. I’m here for the Brotato I’ve come to know and love.

The jungle environments feel familiar, but each Evolution path introduces new hazards. The green Mutation environment occasionally features holes in the ground that neither you nor ground-based enemies can cross. Flying enemies, however, can pass right over them. The purple Mecha environment introduces oil puddles that slow your movement. Just what I need, more obstacles to make it harder for me to successfully complete a run.

The dinosaurs provide both visual variety and a new challenge. Packs of dinosaurs occasionally charge across the screen. How nice of them to provide red directional arrows to warn you of their approach. It’s an entertaining twist, although the warnings don’t necessarily make the stampedes any easier to avoid, especially when all the chaos is popping off.

So far, I’ve only dabbled with two of the new characters: Droid and Variant.

Droid follows the Mecha Evolution path, where you spend Mecha points to improve your stats rather than receive conventional level-up upgrades. The catch is that instead of losing health when you take damage, you lose materials. Run out of materials, and your run is over.

This changes how you approach the shop between waves. Normally, I’m happy to spend it all, just like in real life. With Droid, every purchase carries additional risk. Spend too much, and you could find yourself in serious trouble during the next wave. One hit, one kill. I’ve been there, and it sucks.

Variant takes the Mutation path, with automatic mutations after each wave and a chance to replace mutated items with better versions. The trade-off is a 25% reduction in XP gain.

During one run, I bought a dino egg that I had to protect for three waves. My reward? A dinosaur companion equipped with the same machine gun I was touting. It remained with me for the rest of the run, and frankly, I needed the help. What’s not to love about a dinosaur with a machine gun? My only question is why it wasn’t equipped with some of the other guns I had on me.

One thing that surprised me was how quickly I managed to complete a run. Not the first time I’ve heard that, by the way. But yeah, I finished a Danger 2 run with Variant and reached wave 17 on Danger 3, along with a handful of shorter attempts. Considering how punishing Brotato can be, I wasn’t expecting to secure a victory quite so soon.

Is Primal Dread easier than the original game? Perhaps. Or maybe those 40-plus hours of experience, along with all the other goddamn shmups and bullet this, that, and the other thing I play daily, are finally paying off. I’m not ready to declare the expansion easier based on a few runs.

I’ve been playing Primal Dread on both the Steam Deck and AYN Odin 3 Max, and the experience has been excellent on both handhelds. On the Odin 3 Max, the game maintained a steady 120 FPS through DroidDeck, even during the more chaotic waves. Controls felt responsive, and I experienced no noticeable performance issues.

I found myself preferring the Odin 3 Max slightly, mostly because of its audio. Its AMOLED display also looks fantastic, although I haven’t directly compared it against my OLED Steam Deck.

I picked up Primal Dread for $3.59 thanks to a small discount for completing my DLC collection. At that price, I have absolutely no complaints. With the price of everything in this world going up, I need to save those 40 cents wherever I can. Don’t judge me.

The expansion doesn’t reinvent Brotato, nor does it need to. The Evolution system introduces meaningful decisions, the characters offer different challenges, and the prehistoric setting provides welcome variety. It’s a little more of the Brotato I already love and a little evolution of the formula. For someone with over 40 hours in one of the genre’s greats, that’s more than enough reason to return.

Game screenshots: PlayItAgain.gg (AYN Odin 3).

---