If you've ever had a crippling Vampire Survivors or Slay the Spire habit, avoid Vampire Crawlers at all costs

Vampire Crawlers deckbuilding dungeon crawler — (Image credit: poncle)

What do you get when you fuse the ultimate half-paying-attention time-waster with the act of collecting cards, somehow the most compulsive activity known to man, and then make it go really fast? You get a game seemingly grown in a lab to be the ultimate time killer. Vampire Crawlers is Wolverine for your social calendar.

At least that's the impression I got from playing the demo, which I meant to take for a brief spin on Sunday and then played for two uninterrupted hours, straight past midnight.

The pitch, which I think is a savvy one given the prevalence of card roguelikes on Steam today, is speed: developer poncle isn't calling it "the turbo wildcard" for nothing. As in your typical dungeon crawler, you're moving around a map one step at a time, with monsters on the field triggering combat encounters when you walk up to them. Then out come the cards, already familiar if you've played Vampire Survivors: knives and axes and bibles and armor, recontextualized here to hit certain numbers of enemies at once or knock them back or top up your defenses for a turn.

That sounds mindless, right? In an easy battle against some basic skellies, it can be—as in Vampire Survivors, there are moments here where you've assembled a deck and can just bulldoze the encounter as damage numbers fill the screen. But also like Vampire Survivors, as soon as the difficulty ramps up a little bit just throwing out cards is a way to suddenly find yourself dying to a neon bat.

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Proper play is built around a combo system, which multiplies the damage of each successive card when played in ascending mana cost. This affects not just in-the-moment play but deckbuilding—stuff your deck with too many zero cost cards or too many powerful 3 mana cards, and you may not have enough 1s and 2s to keep a combo going.

Treasure chests and level up screens also award gems that can slot bonuses like 2x damage onto specific cards, which further encourage thinking about play order—why waste an 80 damage card when it could become a 360 damage card when played at the right time?

I barely started to wrap my head around a lot of the other card interplay going on in Vampire Crawlers that's been adapted from Survivors—how to take advantage of Spinach juicing up my overall damage percentage, Duplicator adding extra projectiles for every played card, and card colors dictating what upgrades can be applied to them.

I ended up playing Vampire Crawlers at a thinkier, less manic pace than the game allows—even on the Steam Deck it showed no signs of slowdown when I tested out the "play your whole hand at once" button and watched the particles and gems fly—but I have a feeling my default pace will grow faster and faster as what cards to play in what order becomes second nature.

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As you'd expect from a Vampire Survivors spin-off, there are scads of things to unlock, from characters to permanent stat boosts to abilities that put hidden points of interest on your map. Evolutions are still a thing if you have the right combination of cards in your deck, bosses sometimes appear out of nowhere to surprise you, and levels sharply increase in challenge when you repeat them on harder difficulties.

It's early to call it, but Vampire Crawlers' best idea may be how it's interpreted passive bonuses like Spinach or Clover, which boosts your luck, into wildcards. In the original game these would often be sitting around the map waiting for you to pick them up, but here they serve as one-time-use combo extenders when you play them (the passive bonus stays active for the rest of the run, but the card is gone from your deck). At first I was burning them as soon as I drew them—but then I realized they'd come in clutch in a tough boss fight, allowing me to dramatically increase my combo chain.

Once I geared a deck towards filling my hand with extra cards and mana boosts, my usual 0-1-2 combo could become 0-1-2-W-0-1-2-3, with damage ramping up so sharply I could kill a floor boss in a single hand. Considering there's a screenshot on the Steam page showing a x40 multiplier, I am clearly just scratching the surface.

Vampire Crawlers 40x multiplier — (Image credit: poncle)

The game already seems polished and stuffed with stuff, with release planned for sometime in the middle of 2026. It'll be available to play in Steam Next Fest next week, but I suggest approaching with caution. Sure, it looks a bit frivolous. And in terms of head-scratching strategy, Vampire Crawlers does still seem to fall on the light end of the deckbuilder spectrum.

But just like Vampire Survivors, I suspect that's what will make it so dangerous. Just one more run, right? How long could it take?

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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