Roblox's Latest Breakout Game is Plants Vs Brainrots
- Stephen Dypiangco
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
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By Ken Bryan
Released in August 2025, Plants vs Brainrots quietly entered the Roblox ecosystem before exploding in late September, peaking at nearly 9 million concurrent players over the recent weekend (10/11/2025). That surge now places it among the top four biggest Roblox games ever recorded, according to Rollimons data, trailing only Steal a Brainrot, Grow a Garden, and 99 Nights in the Forest. Its numbers continue to climb week over week, averaging 856K concurrent users and over 1 billion visits over 2 recent weeks, which firmly puts it as a top-three played game by average CCUs for that period. *
*Data sourced from RoMonitor on 10/14. Two-week window used to capture the recent surge.
What makes this rise especially notable is who’s behind it. The game is developed by Yo Gurt Studio, owned by no other than Jandel, one of Roblox’s most prominent figures and responsible for Grow a Garden, one of the platform’s defining hits. His new project immediately reignited curiosity: could he capture that same magic again?
In practice, Plants vs Brainrots feels like Grow a Garden, infused with the chaotic meme energy of Steal a Brainrot and grounded in the familiar tower-defense DNA of Plants vs Zombies.
Grow a Garden x Steal a Brainrot x Plants vs Zombies = Plants vs Brainrots
The result of this mash-up is a game that feels instantly familiar yet surprisingly fresh. It’s further proof that Jandel knows how to distill Roblox’s most popular mechanics into scalable, high-engagement hits.
Core Gameplay: A Simple Loop with Strategic Depth
At its core, Plants vs Brainrots runs on a deceptively simple, endlessly repeatable loop that anyone can pick up in seconds but that keeps players hooked for hours.
Core Gameplay Loop:
Buy seeds from the in-game shop
Plant them in your garden: a lane-based path where waves of Brainrots attack
Defend against waves using plants and gears
Collect currency from defeated enemies
Upgrade your plants, unlock rarer seeds, and purchase new tools or weapons
Repeat to face stronger and more valuable Brainrots
After every 500 kills, players encounter a boss, a major difficulty spike that demands real planning and timing. The boss depends on the player’s current rebirth tier, creating a mastery layer that rewards efficiency and persistence. And if you want to face the game’s toughest bosses, you’ll need to grind your way there. Every tier is a test of endurance as much as skill.
Where the game truly separates itself is through its Rebirth system, a mechanic more akin to prestiging in Call of Duty than anything typically seen in Roblox. Players reset progress in exchange for permanent bonuses and powerful unlocks.
When players rebirth:
Cash, Brainrots, boss levels, and spawner upgrades reset
Plants, gears, previous rebirth bonuses remain
Each rebirth grants +50% Luck and +50% Money, stacking permanently
Rebirth turns the loop into a mastery chase. Reaching higher rebirth levels isn’t just for bragging rights. Each tier unlocks new bosses, stronger gear, and bigger islands. Progression becomes about how efficiently you can rebuild, not just how long you play.
It’s this system that transforms Plants vs Brainrots from a casual tower-defense sim into a long-term progression grind that rewards strategy, optimization, and commitment. It’s a smart evolution, simple on the surface, but structured for deep engagement and strong retention over time.
The most recent update added Cards, collectible modifiers that grant damage boosts, income bonuses, and passive effects through a deck system tied to Rebirth tiers, giving players an additional card slot with each rebirth. This update adds another layer to the game, pushing it beyond idle farming into strategic deck-building while also introducing an RNG-driven thrill.
Opening card packs brings the excitement of chasing rare pulls, a concept that has proven highly engaging in other ecosystems like Pokémon TCG Pocket and is now appearing in Roblox titles such as Plants vs Brainrots and NFL Universe. It is a smart evolution that blends strategy and chance, deepening engagement and keeping Plants vs Brainrots feeling fresh long after the initial grind.
A Mashup of Three Hits: Familiar DNA, New Formula
Plants vs Brainrots isn’t reinventing the wheel, it’s combining DNA from 3 different games into one hybrid experience. Some mechanics overlap, but each source leaves a distinct fingerprint.
Grow a Garden DNA
Progression backbone: Buy seeds, plant, and upgrade in a familiar farming loop
Dynamic weather and mutations: Environmental/mutation effects alter gameplay
Daily shop rotation: New seeds appear daily, driving repeat play
Pets and hatching: Brainrots can hatch from eggs, mirroring Grow a Garden’s pet system, which, in true Roblox fashion, takes clear inspiration from the endless wave of pet simulators
Steal a Brainrot DNA
Fusion mechanics: Combine plants and Brainrots to create rarer variants
Italian Brainrots: Features iconic Italian Brainrot characters for humor and identity
Flex culture: Rare Brainrots act as collectibles and social status symbols
Plants vs Zombies DNA
Core structure: Lane-based tower defense at its simplest. Plant, Defend, Repeat
Wave escalation: Rising difficulty forces smarter placement and timing
Together, these elements merge Grow a Garden’s farming, Steal a Brainrot’s memes, and Plant vs Zombies' tower-defense gameplay into a system that’s instantly recognizable, culturally resonant, and built for virality.
What the Heck is Italian Brainrot and Why It Matters
While we can talk at length about how Plants vs Brainrots nails its gameplay loop, part of its explosion comes down to pure meme energy. If you’re like me, someone without kids, you might be wondering what the heck “Brainrot” even is.
The term “Brainrot” began as internet slang for being so fixated on a piece of media that it “rots your brain,” later spreading across Tumblr, Twitter, and TikTok as a label for hyper-stimulating, meme-heavy clips. In early 2025, it evolved into Italian Brainrot: AI-voiced animals (cats, sharks, pigeons) delivering absurd, over-the-top monologues that went massively viral. It’s weird, loud, and extremely Gen Z, exactly the kind of chaos that thrives on Roblox.
If you want a taste of just how viral it’s become, look no further than this Italian Brainrot video with over 80 million views, or ABC News recent breakdown of how the trend turned into a cultural phenomenon.
Jandel and Yo Gurt Studio clearly saw how Steal a Brainrot channeled that chaos into one of Roblox’s biggest hits and decided to build on that momentum. Plants vs Brainrots takes the same viral foundation and molds it into a more structured, replayable experience. The Brainrots are instantly recognizable, the humor is built for sharing, and every boss fight feels like a viral clip in motion. The absurdity hooks players, but the progression loop keeps them, showing how Roblox’s top developers are evolving meme culture into lasting game design.
Admin Abuse and the Weekly Updates Drive Peaks Behind Roblox’s Biggest Hits
Like Grow a Garden before it, Plants vs Brainrots uses a steady rhythm of weekly updates and real-time developer events to sustain growth. These aren’t standard content drops, they’re community spectacles.
Every weekend, Plants vs Brainrots hosts what players call “Admin Abuse” events: live sessions where developers trigger weather anomalies, spawn rare Brainrots, restock shops, and hand out limited items while interacting directly with players.
These chaotic sessions, usually held on weekends alongside major updates, have become appointment gaming moments that can spike CCUs into the millions. The name might sound tongue-in-cheek, but Admin Abuse has evolved into one of Roblox’s most effective engagement tools, generating huge hype.
The October Cards update, paired with a major Admin Abuse event, is the latest example of how well-timed updates can create massive momentum spikes. Together, they helped push Plants vs Brainrots to its record-breaking 8 million concurrent players, proving that strategic content drops and live events remain Roblox’s most powerful growth engine.
This update-event-hype cycle now defines Roblox’s top-performing games. It’s the same strategy behind Grow a Garden, 99 Nights in the Forest and Steal a Brainrot’s weekend surges. A repeatable rhythm that keeps communities active and drives CCU peaks.
Growth Trajectory and Where We Go from Here
Plants vs Brainrot’s has moved like a rocket ship since mid- September. As shown in the chart above, the game (Yellow line) has experienced the fastest sustained growth of any top Roblox title in recent weeks. While 99 Nights in the Forest still leads in Average CCUs and Steal a Brainrot continues to generate massive weekend spikes, Plants vs Brainrots is the clear breakout. It overtook Grow a Garden in average CCUs at the end of September and has since held that lead.
If this pattern holds, it’s positioned to be one of Roblox’s top games for the foreseeable future, powered by consistent weekly updates and “Admin Abuse” events, one of the platform’s most recognizable creators at the helm, and a meme-fueled community that keeps engagement high. While it hasn’t yet rivaled 99 Nights in the Forest’s peak performance, its trajectory mirrors Steal a Brainrot’s weekday consistency and is trending upwards. The steady decline of Grow a Garden further reinforces that Jandel’s focus has seemingly shifted squarely to Plants vs Brainrots.
At first glance, Plants vs Brainrots might look like a joke built on internet absurdity. But beneath the chaos lies a surprisingly smart and scalable design that blends Grow a Garden’s accessibility, Steal a Brainrot’s personality, and Plants vs Zombies’ classic structure.
With Plants vs Brainrots, Jandel once again proves he understands Roblox better than almost anyone, and more proof he’s cracked Roblox’s formula for mass appeal.
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