Welcome back to Free Rogue Friday. Now you don’t need to know your Hololive from your Holo House to have a good time with today’s free game…HoloCure: Save the Fans!. This completely free bullet heaven started life as an unofficial Hololive fan game, putting its VTubers into a Vampire Survivors-style fight against enormous crowds of mind-controlled fans. Developer KayAnimate has since kept adding to it until what was already an impressive fan project became a surprisingly huge game in its own right.
As well as being free to play, there are no microtransactions, and its Steam reviews are sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive.
Saving the Fans Requires Beating Up a Lot of Fans
The basic idea behind HoloCure will be immediately familiar if you’ve spent any time with bullet heavens. Pick a character, head into a stage, and start fighting increasingly ridiculous numbers of enemies while collecting experience and putting together a build capable of surviving whatever the game throws at you next.
Those characters are based on members of Hololive, with each bringing their own starting weapon, skills, and Special Attack. Weapons and items are collected and upgraded as you play, but things get really interesting when you start discovering Collabs. Max out two compatible weapons and you can combine them into something considerably nastier, freeing up a weapon slot in the process.
Some combinations can eventually be pushed even further into Super Collabs by throwing a maxed-out item into the recipe too. Before long, the cute little pixel art battlefield has disappeared underneath projectiles, enemies, effects, and damage numbers, exactly as nature intended.
Saving Everyone Wasn’t Enough
The strange thing about HoloCure is how much game exists outside the part where you’re mowing through thousands of fans. Holo House gives you somewhere to spend time when you fancy a break from all the fighting.
You can fish, farm, cook, decorate your house, and hire workers. There’s even the Usada Casino, which arrived as part of the enormous 0.7 update alongside several minigames. That same update added nine more playable characters, new weapons, Collabs, items, Stamps, stages, gathering materials, the Fan Letter system, and additional areas of Holo House.
At this point, calling HoloCure a little fan game feels increasingly inaccurate. There are 97 Steam achievements waiting for anyone who really wants to find out how deep this rabbit hole goes too.
You Really Don’t Have to Be a Hololive Fan
Obviously you’re going to really enjoy HoloCure if you already follow Hololive. Characters, attacks, items, enemies, animations, and plenty of smaller details reference the VTubers and their communities. Fans are going to recognize jokes and references that will sail straight past everyone else. However, it’s super fun even if you don’t follow or have any idea Hololive is.
There’s a huge amount of build experimentation, plenty to unlock, multiple progression systems, and enough additional activities to keep you occupied when you need a break from surviving another screen full of enemies.
Players seem pretty happy with it too. More than 26,000 English Steam reviews have been submitted, with 99% of them positive, and KayAnimate still isn’t finished. The developer confirmed at the end of 2025 that the next major update remained actively in development, with work continuing into 2026.
For something that doesn’t ask you to spend anything, HoloCure: Save the Fans! has an almost unreasonable amount to offer.