What an Adventure is

A run with most of the game taken away, and a campaign built out of what is left.

The game has 8 Adventures, and they are not more stages. An Adventure is a separate campaign with its own progression: its own unlocked characters, its own weapons, its own gold, none of which touch the main game and none of which the main game touches. You start one from scratch however far your account has come.

What makes them play differently is the pool. An ordinary run offers you every weapon you have unlocked; an Adventure offers between 12 and 43 items and nothing else, from a fixed roster. That turns the level-up screen from a question about what you want into a question about what is left - which is the whole point, and why an Adventure is often a better place to learn a weapon than a normal run is.

The chapters are the campaign

Between them the 8 Adventures hold 202 chapters across 52 stages. Each chapter states one thing to do - survive to a minute, open a coffin, evolve a particular weapon - and clearing it opens the next stage and usually hands over a character, a weapon or gold. They are strictly linear: there is no route through an Adventure other than the one it states. The longest is Ode to Castlevania, at 81 chapters.

The Adventures page lists every chapter of every one of them, in the game's own words, with what each gives you - and if you have imported a save it ticks off the ones you have cleared. It reads each Adventure's own save and never mixes it into your main progression, because the game does not either.

The parts the tables do not state

Four things about Adventures are worth knowing and are not in any table the game ships, so they carry a source below rather than being presented as data:

  • Getting in. The three base-game Adventures unlock through the Atlas Gate in Boss Rash; the DLC ones unlock by reaching the Dairy Plant.
  • Ascension points. Finishing an Adventure and then resetting it earns a point, and each one is a permanent +25% to Luck, Growth, Gold or Curse across your whole account. This is the one thing an Adventure gives back to the main game.
  • The Planar Bazaar. A shop rather than a stage - the merchants inside it sell weapons and relics for the Adventure's own gold. It appears at level 80.
  • Nothing carries over between attempts. Abandoning an Adventure partway loses the run, not the chapters you have already cleared.

Sources