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Poncle got its hooks into me again. I wasn’t sure it would happen. Vampire Survivors sort of feels like a lightning in a bottle kind of game in retrospect. But here we are, and Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors is just addictive and satisfying as the original game for different reasons. It’s excellent, with the spin-off referencing the first title in ways that make sense in terms of gameplay and can be quite clever. At the same time, I’m also surprised and delighted by how Poncle and Nosebleed Interactive pulled influences from classic, first-person dungeon-crawlers like Wizardry for Vampire Crawlers.
Like Vampire Survivors, there’s no story in Vampire Crawlers. We’re heading into different dungeons inspired by locations from the original game, such as Mad Forest and Tiny Bridge. Likewise, characters from it such as Antonio and Pasqualina appear as cards you can “recruit” at the start of a run to influence the starting cards and deck you should attempt to build.
When you choose a stage, you enter a map with enemies representing encounters, tablets to smash that might do things like permanently increase mana for the run, chests that can bestow gems to enhance cards or trigger evolutions if you possess the right cards in your deck, encounters with stronger than usual enemies, a moving enemy you can hit with every card in your deck for experience, and torches you can destroy for coins, food, or relics. When you defeat the boss of the floor, a treasure chest appears alongside a shovel to dig down to the next one. If you survive every floor of the dungeon, then Red Death will appear at the end to kill you and end the run.
From there, you return to the village hub. This allows you to track your unlocks. It’s also the spot where you can spend coins you’ve earned on either new characters you’ve unlocked at the pub or invest in permanent upgrades to certain elements. So you could pay to increase the number of rerolls you get at a level up or how much health automatically heals after a fight.
The magicof Vampire Crawlers is that it captures the speed and weapon-passive pairing from Vampire Survivors, yet this spin-off game still maintains the sort of combo-creating and strategizing that comes from deck-building roguelikes. Toss in the way it forces you to think about the path you take through some dungeons in the same way Wizardry style games did, and it’s a fantastic combination. The dungeon-crawling itself is perfectly handled, complete with the option to need to use the right analog stick for turning your point of view and left for actual movement. (You can turn that off.) The map feels very necessary, due to the way some chests may be off the beaten path, enemies could be hidden just around a corner and out of view, and you might not be able to tell if it’s a miniboss sort of foe or regular encounter without checking that. It feels thoughtful and like you really should be checking your path.
With the combat, it is such that you can just toss cards immediately at foes without much thought, but it is to your benefit to think things through once you finish the first floor of most dungeons. This is because there are so many fantastic combo options and ways to break the system. The game offers a button you can press if you want to play every card in your hand. (This is a fantastic option if they are all ones that require 0 mana to use and there are no single-use cards you need to save for an evolution.) But you can go one-by-one, you can create combos or play in an order that ensures you line up your buffs and character card bonuses to ensure they take effect. In one run, Poe basically never left at one point after I played his character card, because I kept playing 0 mana cost Spellbinder cards that would make his ability trigger once more before “leaving.” So since I kept playing that and additional 0 mana blue Armor cards that would let me draw another card, I kept extending my turns and staying alive. (It was very handy when I tried that kind of deck build again at Tiny Bridge.) And, since the cards will visibly update the text to show when a possible combo is in effect, it’s easy to remember the “right” plays even if it’s your first time playing.
I also loved how the evolution system worked and felt a bit easier to manage here. The same sort of evolution recipes from Vampire Survivors are present in Vampire Crawlers, which is great if you’re a returning player. However, you can also try and shoot for that or go for gems being slotted onto cards to make their basic forms more useful. Let’s use Runetracer as an example. It’s a 1 mana a card that deals 15 damage and briefly bounces around during a fight to cause more damage. Slotting an Amount gem into it to make more of them appear when used or a Double Damage to make it deal 30 damage are great options. But if you keep its gem slot empty and get an Armor card, you could evolve it to No Future, which deals the 15 damage, bounces, and explodes. However, early on in a run you only have 2 mana, making it impossible to use until you upgrade or get an Empty Tome that increases your mana by 1. Oh, and by the way, on your first few runs with someone whose starting cards feature a lot of 0 cost ones, such as Gennaro with his Knife and his red card trigger for extra projectiles, make sure you slot Echo gems that let you reuse a card into said knives for more damage. Since we eventually can add additional gem slots to cards via the Blacksmith and coins, it can mean getting to evolve it without losing out on perks.
Vampire Crawlers also offers the same sort of runtime as Vampire Survivors in a clever way. As in that game, Death comes for you at a certain point. While in the original, this happened after a set amount of time, here it happens when you hit a certain floor or point in a dungeon. No spoilers, but there are ways to fight back. It’s fascinating and adds another possible layer of challenge to the experience.
Vampire Crawlers offers Wizardry-like dungeon-crawling and roguelike deckbuilding without abandoning the Vampire Survivor roots Poncle and Nosebleed Interactive never abandon elements from the previous game. Instead, there’s a level of care put forth to ensure there’s this sense of belonging. The result is something that feels like a loving tribute while still feeling unique.
Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors will launch on the Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on April 21, 2026. There’s no release date for the mobile version yet.
