Vampire Survivors deckbuilding spinoff is every bit as inventive

That reaction to my first hours-long binge session speaks to what’s so special about Poncle, one of the indie scene’s most exciting new developers: it sees no distance between gimmick and quality. 2022’s breakout Vampire Survivors could have been a pixel art novelty act with little staying power beyond a few fun sessions. But Poncle fine-tuned its reverse bullet-hell concept into a revelation, creating an inventive spin on the roguelike genre that already feels foundational three years later.

Against all odds, Poncle and co-developer Nosebleed Interactive pull off the same trick with Vampire Crawlers. A spinoff gimmick takes on a life of its own, thanks to some well-executed ideas that pair naturally with Vampire Survivors’ secret sauce. Even with some clear weak points in its card play, I can’t pry myself away from this fast-paced deckbuilder that hides plenty of strategic depth behind Poncle’s signature visual chaos.

Vampire Crawlers is set up like an old-school PC dungeon crawler. You navigate a level in first-person, using directional keys to move block by block. Your goal on each floor is to fight enemies, rack up experience points, find treasure chests, and gradually build out the deck of cards that you use to fight before taking on a boss and dropping to the next floor. Visually, it’s like getting dropped into a first-person Vampire Survivors mod, as you meet that game’s cast of 16-bit ghouls up close. That perspective lets me better appreciate Survivors’ expressive sprites, which could only previously be viewed like ugly ants in a zoomed-out view.

Most of Survivors’ ideas are represented in some way, despite Crawlers being a very different kind of game. You still select a stage to fight through, pick a specific character with their own unique starting weapon, open chests that contain three upgrade options, get permanent boosts with the gold you collect, and complete a massive list of achievements to unlock new toys. Those structural hooks are just as much a part of Survivors’ appeal as the one-stick action is, and it’s impressive that Poncle found a way to slot them into a different format so naturally.

The twist is that you fight monsters in turn-based battles using card versions of Vampire Survivors’ weapons. When a battle begins, a row of enemies appears in front of you. On your turn, your job is to play as many cards as you can with your limited mana to take out the monsters in that row, before they can attack or generate enough shield to shrug off damage during their turn. When monsters in a row are defeated, any creatures from the row behind them come to the front of the line until you’ve vanquished them all. It’s a clever way to replicate the wave defense idea of Vampire Survivors in a turn-based card game.

Winning a battle isn’t just about having powerful cards that can hit multiple enemies at once. Sure, it’s handy to have a whip or dagger storm that hits a whole row at once at zero cost. The trick, though, is that cards gain more power if you play them in ascending order of cost. If you’re optimizing a turn, you’ll want to play all your zero-cost cards first, then your one-cost, and so on. Early on, when you don’t have many cards and are only drawing a few per turn, that system can feel limited. If you’re dealt three cards, there’s an obvious best order to play them in. That seemingly restrictive idea loosens up once you grasp the basics and start digging up the nuances, but it takes time to get there.

The meat of Crawlers happens in the building process. It’s not about playing the cards so much as giving yourself the tools to make an untouchable deck. You add a new card to your deck every time you level up by sucking up familiar gems, and each one can be augmented with modifiers you discover, like 2x damage boosts. The strategic depth flows from that idea. In one of my runs, I applied a perk to a dagger card that made it so every other attack I played while the dagger was in my hand would receive a damage boost. I gave another dagger an ability that let me draw an additional dagger from my deck, ensuring that I could pull out that card more often. As a result, it became advantageous to play a card out of sequence. In another run, I went all in on cards that would give me more mana per turn and let me draw more cards, allowing me to sometimes play a dozen cards in one turn. Once you have a deck full of mods and utility cards that augment the next played attack, Crawlers becomes more involved than a simple counting game.

That’s not far off from the secret thrill of Survivors. What you do in that game is ultimately very simple: move to avoid attacks. It’s a minimalist game on its surface, but a Survivors run quickly becomes strategic the more you experiment and learn how to build synergies out of its mess of auto-attacking weapons. The same is true for Crawlers. A deck of randomly cobbled-together cards that you play in a strict order isn’t going to get through a late-stage boss fight. You need to make deliberate choices as you level up to create a flexible deck where you can make something out of any hand you’re given.

That’s the big-brain appeal. The more primitive joy just comes from seeing your cards fire off weapons and mow down monsters in a pixelated fury. Once you have your strategy down, you can execute a turn at lightning speed, thanks to fast animations and responsive controls. I can activate half a dozen cards in a second, watching a flood of knives, fireballs, and lightning blasts take over the screen. One of my favorite runs so far revolved around a skeleton who starts with a set of bone cards that ricochet off of enemies. I kept adding more bones to my hand when I could, allowing me to quickly play four or five in an instant. The prize? Getting to see dozens of tiny bones destroy waves of enemies like a swarm of locusts. It’s the same joy I get from creating a positively busted Survivors build that floods my screen with more objects than my poor computer can handle.

Image: Poncle/Nosebleed Interactive

There are a few quirks that make Crawlers a little bit messy compared to the elegant Survivors. Character perks, which often revolve around playing a certain color of card, aren’t well explained or visualized. Later stages can get excessively long, sometimes lasting well over an hour. And it can sometimes feel like I have to grind for gold so I can get enough permanent upgrades to make it through linear bridge levels that create annoying progress choke points. Despite being so casual-friendly on its surface, Crawlers can be deceptively demanding if you want to unlock everything it has to offer. It can be a real time- and attention-eater.

At the moment, I’m happy to let Crawlers chomp away so long as it keeps rewarding my strategic thinking. Poncle has once again created a game that takes the visual language of classic games and naturally fuses it with fresh design ideas. Where Survivors was indebted to old-school Castlevania games, Crawlers pulls off the same trick with Dungeon Master. That’s what elevates a potential gimmick into something that’s inventive and reverential at the same time. I can’t stay mad at it for long.

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors is out now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.