Vampire Crawlers mashes up deckbuilding and dungeon crawling in the best ways possible

It immediately caught my attention when poncle released a game demo this spring for the Steam Next Fest. Vampire Survivors has consumed so many hours of my life since its launch in 2022 that I didn’t need to know anything beyond “poncle” and “new game” to hop on the bandwagon. Since then, I’ve not only played through the demo, but managed to get my hands on a full copy (thanks, poncle!). The new game, titled Vampire Crawlers, caters to my interests so exactly that it feels like I should search my room for hidden cameras. I know I’m not the only gamer out there with a passion for 1980s-style dungeon crawlers, tongue-in-cheek humor, deckbuilders, outlandish fantasy monsters, and roguelites, but it’s a pretty specific audience at the center of that Venn diagram.  

For anyone who does share those passions with me, I’ll keep this simple. You need to play this game. If you have any nostalgia for classic RPG dungeon crawlers and/or a devotion for the reverse bullet hell magic of Vampire Survivors, this game was made for you. Dripping with retro style and delivering gameplay that’s equal parts strategic and clicky, this game is primed to be your new obsession.  

But maybe you weren’t playing RPGs back when The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was still a glimmer in Todd Howard’s eye, and you’re wondering if this retro-styled package can hold your attention on its own merits. I’ll argue that even though Vampire Crawlers is loaded with references to the past, poncle has bottled magic yet again with a game that’s unquestionably fresh and new. By shifting the perspective and integrating strategic deckbuilder gameplay, Vampire Crawlers not only breathes new life into the Vampire Survivor-verse, it creates a package that’s just as genre-defining as its predecessor. 

In the next year, if we’re not talking about Crawlers-likes in the same way that we’ve been talking about Survivors-likes, I’m very mistaken indeed.  

A friendly start that ramps up fast  

Vampire Crawlers starts with a friendly introduction sequence which familiarizes you with its foundational elements. Rather than the top-down view of Vampire Survivors, Vampire Crawlers brings you down to the ground and shows you the world through the eyes of your chosen Crawler. Maps are laid out in a grid that you navigate square by square. Movement can happen entirely with the arrow keys on your keyboard, a refreshingly retro arrangement, though the game is every bit as intuitive with a controller as it is with mouse and keyboard. 

Within the limitations of its pixel-art style and fixed perspective, Vampire Crawlers manages to pull off some impressively effective visuals. It doesn’t aim for realism, but that doesn't stop it from pulling off some vibes. The sprite-style enemies are memorable and strange and blocky, and somehow also menacing at surprising moments. The opening Mad Forest level eases you in with an understated landscape, but the Dairy Plant is an unsettling industrial wasteland — its chain-link fences remind me of the broken world of Half-Life in all the right ways. Gallo Tower combines interior and exterior spaces to create a massive gothic space fit for the vampire who always seems to be in another coffin. And the capstone level Cappella Magna gets an impressive glow-up.  

As a Vampire Survivors veteran, I enjoyed seeing these familiar locations from a fresh perspective, and I got a kick out of seeing fan-favorite weapons like the whips, axes, wands, guns, and garlic make a return. This time, though, these armaments no longer fly out into the battlefield on their own accord. Your weapons are cards. Combat is turn-based and follows your own timing. You draw cards, play as many as you can based on your available energy, and then turn things over to your enemies, who tend to approach in swarms. You have as much time as you like to mull over decisions, taking some of the pressure off as you learn its systems. But it’s also built for super-fast, clicky turns. Once you get into its groove, exploration and combat move quickly. 

One brief aside: some card games, especially in the tabletop universe, can intimidate newcomers with the raft of instructions printed on seemingly every card. In Vampire Crawlers, cards are easy to understand at a glance, giving you most of the information you need to know with their color and energy cost. Magic: the Gathering this is not.  

As you kill enemies, you collect experience coins. Gather enough of those coins and you level up, earning you the opportunity to add another card to your deck (or a gem — more on those in a moment). As your deck increases in power, you’ll be able to take on harder enemies as you crawl your way through the levels of a dungeon. 

Power up, pick a crew, and prepare for battle at the village 

Vampire Crawlers is a roguelite, so it’s built on a gameplay loop that sends you out into the world to battle as many monsters, gather as much loot, and unlock as many secrets as you can before your inevitable death hits. But every death is just a doorway back to the village, where hard-earned coins can be turned into permanent buffs and your relentless exploration is rewarded with new characters to play.  

First up is the Inn, which lets you select your Crawler. Crawlers differ when it comes to starting stats and starter cards, but what’s most interesting is that your Crawler is also a card in your deck that you play. Each Crawler has a unique ability that can trigger during combat. Put a Crawler card in play, and it establishes a trigger effect tied to certain card type. Play a card that matches that color or description, and you’ll activate an effect like drawing more cards, getting more mana, or buffing a stat. Crawler cards persist between battles until they run through a certain number of activations, at which point the card gets shuffled back into your deck. Crawlers get even more fun once you unlock the ability to add a second or third Crawler card to your starting deck. 

Equally important is the powerup shop. In each of your dungeon crawls, you’ll collect gold coins in addition to experience coins. As you expect from a roguelite, you can spend your gold back at base to acquire powerups that persist between runs, boosting your odds of survival. The system is very similar to Vampire Survivors. At any time, you can reset your powerups and get your coins refunded, an arrangement that encourages experimentation. The opening selection of powerups is limited, but the menu keeps expanding as you delve deeper into the game.  

Other starting buildings include the Town Hall, which helpfully lists unlocks, and the Graveyard, which lets you access game settings and quit. As you explore the game and find relics hidden across its maps, you’ll unlock even more buildings that provide even more modifiers and strategic options for your runs.  

Built for PC gaming on the go  

I’ve given Vampire Crawlers an extensive trial on two different systems to get a feel for which control system I like the best. Because I’m a mouse-and-keyboard diehard (see: my passion for classic dungeon crawlers), I first stayed in my comfort zone. Keyboard-wise, the game puts the WASD keys in charge of movement and either the arrow keys or the Q and E keys in control of turning. I have to admit that it’s been a long time since I used anything but mouse look for turning a character, so it took me a couple of runs to get comfortable with the arrangement. 

What did feel natural to me was using my mouse to select and play cards. But that comfort made me a little too hesitant to entrust the game to a console-style controller, which perhaps explains why it took me too long to dig into the game with my ROG Xbox Ally X. Now, it’s my preferred way to play. The split controls for moving and looking translate perfectly to dual sticks, and I love the tactile feel of smashing buttons as I blitz my way through turns. Unquestionably, Vampire Crawlers is going to be my new favorite game to play on the Ally when I'm stuck on a long flight. 

Interlocking systems up the ante without losing the plot 

In its first few minutes, Vampire Crawlers establishes a straightforward, simple formula that’s fun and accessible. But it doesn’t make you wait long before it starts adding some welcome complexity. Give it even just an hour or two, and you’ll find yourself daydreaming about what approach you’ll take for your next run. 

The first twist that the game introduces is a combo system. In contrast to some other deckbuilders, the game places a heavy priority on the order in which you play your cards. If you play a card that costs exactly one more mana than the card played before it, you build up a combo. As you build up that combo, the effects of each card played ramps up accordingly. A card that does 48 damage on its own might do 96, 144, or 192 damage, depending on how far you’ve been able to build it up, and you have potential to go even higher with enough wild cards, card draw, and mana generation. The combo multiplier applies to effects like gaining mana, drawing cards, building armor, or replenishing health, too, greatly increasing the possibilities for strategic play. 

Unlock Arcanas, and you’ll have a new location in town to visit: the Fortune Teller. There, you’ll be able to select a card that has a profound impact on gameplay, like the ability to have up to five mana carry over from one turn to the next. Accessing new Arcanas opens up new gameplay possibilities, so it’s wise to use the game’s unlocks library to learn how to get more options. 

Even cards themselves aren’t static. Many cards have a slot that can be equipped with a gem. There’s a huge list of gems, and the possible effects that they can put into play range from straightforward to game-changing. Gems are acquired in the same ways new cards – as you level up, open chests, and encounter odd structures and events in the game, you’ll be offered a variety of gems by the time a run is through. Through an unlockable building in the village, you’ll be able to add gem slots to card and adjust the rarity of specific games, but fair warning: those upgrades are expensive. 

Finally, evolutions make a return from the original game, albeit in a different form. Evolution gems allow you to unlock the “evolved” form of a weapon provided that you have an open gem slot on that weapon card and you have at least one of the required secondary cards for the evolution. For example, if you have a Magic Wand card with an open gem slot, and you also have the Empty Tome, Light Tome, or Ancient Tome, the Evolution Gem for the Holy Wand might be offered as a reward the next time you open a chest or defeat a boss. Evolving the Magic Wand will fill a gem slot on the card, convert it into the Holy Wand, and consume the Tome that you selected to sacrifice for the evolution. 

Evolved cards are significantly more powerful than their standard counterparts, but they typically have a higher mana cost. That can be a limitation, but it also creates the possibility of running larger combos. Planning ahead for card evolutions is one spot where veterans of Vampire Survivors will have an edge, as the evolutions card combos follow a pattern similar to the older game, but Crawlers gives players a grimoire before long that provides a convenient reference for what evolves into what.  

Expect a challenge  

Put all these elements together, and there’s enough complexity and variety in Vampire Crawlers to satisfy strategy buffs. Each system on its own is straightforward and accessible, but combine together in striking and powerful ways. More importantly, the game all but requires you to start fine-tuning your setup for each run, because the levels get difficult, and they get difficult fast. 

Make no mistake. The minion swarms in Vampire Crawlers can be brutal. You might fly through the early groups of mobs in the first levels, but bosses have big health pools that require you to have a plan in place for survival, whether that’s armor or crowd control. Unlocking a new section of the map is always an exciting moment, but there’s a lot of value in replaying earlier levels with a variety of characters and strategies so that you can build up your arsenal of powerups.  

Truthfully, the difficulty ramps are a big part of why I’ve gotten so obsessed with Vampire Crawlers. If I wanted idle, frictionless gameplay, I could find that in a thousand forgettable titles. I like it when a game gives me a real set of decisions to make, with some choices inarguably better than others. It’s incredibly satisfying to encounter a challenge, try out a few different strategies, and finally find one that works.  

Some advice for newcomers 

A big part of the joy of Vampire Crawlers comes from trial and error, so don’t take my advice here as gospel. But I do have a few suggestions for anyone who hits an early wall with the game’s difficulty curve. 

The first is to keep trying. Dying really isn’t all that much of a setback. Spend your coins on upgrades and try again. Even a little persistence will pay off. 

Second, pay a lot of attention to the available unlocks listed in the Town Hall. More than just a list of what’s possible in the game, the unlocks suggest to you how the developers think you ought to be playing the game. For instance, in my early runs I didn’t pay an awful lot of attention to the combo system. I thought my little 0-1-2 combo runs were all that the game had in mind. And then I stumbled into a build that allowed for a 30-ish card combo, and I realized just how much you can blow the game open by prioritizing this mechanic. If I’d paid more attention earlier to the unlock tied to hitting a 10-card combo, I would have had some easier runs. 

In terms of powerups, I’ll recommend two as offering a lot of bang for your buck. Having a revive is really, really valuable. Inevitably, you’ll have rounds where you just draw the wrong combination of cards at the wrong time. A revive prevents one of those moments from ending your run. Second, the ability to add more than one Crawler card to your deck is game-changing. As soon as you can access this powerup, you should grab it, even if it means refunding your other powerups. 

Rekindling the magic  

The best thing that I can say about Vampire Crawlers is that it gave me one of those all-too-rare gaming moments where I realize that a game’s playground of possibilities is much, much larger than I had expected going in. 

A moment like that was what hooked me on Vampire Survivors. In my first stint with that game, I had finally made it to the second level, where I was unapologetically assaulted with swarms of enemies right from the start. Unable to duck and weave, like I’d done with the early waves of bats in the Mad Forest, I doubled down on offense. And then everything clicked. The minions dropped like flies. The experience points started rolling in. The cadence of new weapon upgrades kicked into high gear. No longer the hunted, I became the hunter, a living and moving deathball of magic and medieval weaponry. 

In that moment, it felt like I’d broken the game, that I’d found a way to turn its many intertwining systems against it. But then the last minute of the level hit, and the screen filled with tanky monsters able to soak up all the damage I could manage and more. With the finish line in sight, my rampage slowed to a halt, I was swarmed, and I died.  

But something about that death wasn’t disappointing. It was exhilarating. I thought I’d broken out of the game’s walled garden. But as it turned out, the game’s playground was much, much larger than I realized. To truly push its boundaries, I’d need to uncover even more of its secrets. 

That’s where I’m currently at with Vampire Crawlers. With about 35 hours played, I’ve opened up enough systems, characters, and powerups that I’m starting to feel more like a conquering hero than a fragile scavenger. But I still feel like I’m only scratching at the game’s possibilities. The game’s many systems are just begging to be exploited in the service of some truly bonkers strategies.  

Time will tell if Vampire Crawlers ends up enjoying the same amount of new characters, maps, and game modes that fleshed out Vampire Survivors over the years, by free update and by expansion. Certainly, the game certainly looks like it has plenty of opportunity for it. The question for the moment is whether it’s worth its $9.99 (USD) price tag today. And as far as I’m concerned, the answer is a resounding yes. Even adjusting for the rose-colored glasses that I wear as a longstanding RPG enthusiast, this game is just fun. Clicky, strategic, accessible, and challenging, this game caters to nostalgia but doesn’t make it a requirement for entry.  

So get in and start crawling. This game’s worth every penny. And if you’re a Game Pass subscriber, you’ve got it day one — so there’s really no excuse not to check it out right now.