IIn case you wanted to smash together two of the most addictive games in the last few years for a fast-paced dopamine overload, poncle has got you covered. Yes, it wasn’t enough for Vampire Survivors (their acclaimed action roguelike/bullet heaven game with more Castlevania influence in it than most recent Castlevania games) to have a crossover DLC with Balatro, they had to go and make their own twisted card game that has burned a hole in my eyes with all the excitement and lights you’d expect.
Vampire Crawlers was easily one of my most anticipated indie games of this year ever since it was announced a few months ago. A sequel-spinoff to a game I dumped [redacted] hours into across two platforms? Hell yeah. It has changed though, this time taking the form of a wicked dungeon crawler the Gen Xers and elder millennials will be right at home with if they were slapping keyboards at a young age like me.
Cards so cool, you want to get them professionally graded
Mad Forest and Inlaid Library wasting waves and waves of familiar foes as you navigate a maze collecting powerups, coinage, and elusive whole cooked chickens for health. Your WASD keys move your Crawler from tile to tile, and your Q and E keys turn your view in case you actually want to see where you’re going instead of strafing hip-first into danger. If you want to one-hand it, there’s buttons to click with your mouse to perform these movement actions as well.
Battles are facilitated through cards which are embossed with classic weapons like the whip, King Bible, knife, axe, and utilities like armor and duplicators that give you more attacks per card. You have a set number of mana for each turn and each card has a mana requirement to play, anywhere from 0 to 3 from what I encountered in the demo. This will come pretty naturally to anyone that’s played a similar deck-builder roguelike like Slay the Spire for instance.
The real fun is stacking combos with your cards. Play cards sequentially based on mana cost and the effects of your cards multiply. Turn your cards that give you 6 armor into 18 armor by playing it third in sequence during a turn, or easily get your attack cards into the triple digits for damage by doing the same. If there’s one thing I had to learn quickly to succeed in Vampire Crawlers, it was to strategize with this technique to wipe the screen of enemies and… survive. Don’t depend on low-mana cards or stack your deck with higher-level ones. Balance is key!
Play your Antonio Crawler card, then any red cards in your hand for bonus fun
You level up with gems dropped from slain enemies just like Vampire Survivors, and each level-up offers an opportunity for big gains, namely adding a new card to your deck or a gem you can stamp onto an existing card with an empty gem slot, complete with an animation of a smithy’s hammer blasting that thing onto the card. Gems can provide many modifiers like doubling the damage a card does, making the card return immediately to your hand for a second salvo, or giving you armor. Ever whip five bats in the mouth and then get +3 armor for the occasion? You can here.
Once you get the hang of everything, battles really start to lean in your favor, but they’re not without challenge. Encounters can be decently long with hordes of enemies swarming you to chip away at your health without proper defensive cards. If luck isn’t on your side, you just have to eat some damage and hope you can find a candelabra around the map housing, somehow, a succulent chicken for you. Each map consists of multiple floors and increasingly tough fights so moderation is key–don’t be like me and try to beat every encounter on every floor and expect to complete the run without properly upgrading your Crawlers.
And damn is it fun to upgrade and reap the rewards of your murderous sowing. You have a cornucopia of permanent stat boosts and other modifiers to give you a long-term edge against every horror-based horror you come up against, slowly but surely earned and pushing you to make new runs until your sleep schedule is upended. Unlock new Crawlers too and take their unique ability cards into the fray to see who you mesh with best. If the final roster is anything like Vampire Survivors, then you could make a part-time job out of experimenting with the heaps of characters on offer.
This screen legally qualifies as a drug in some territories
My immediate concerns are mostly nitpicky and nothing that poncle can’t iron out between now and release. Sometimes I’d nuke a monster so hard that its body would persist in the encounter, though perform no additional actions and it did disappear once I finished and went back to the exploring phase of the run. The volume is also wildly mixed to me. Opening a chest at the game’s default 100% sound effects volume was like being at a sound check at a stadium concert. Even lowering it to 75%, the more noisy and celebratory moments threatened to kick my ears off my head. Aside from those, translating the fun I had in this demo to a full game will all depend on the breadth of content: cards, characters, locales, the gameplay loop holding up over time, and any other surprises that elicit intrigue in my overstimulated brain.
I’m also not entirely sold on the increased effort of production that’s in Vampire Crawlers. There’s now voice acting in the game, in this demo consisting of little call-outs and banter from your Crawler while playing certain cards. It’s not very intrusive and obviously mutable if you desire, but just an interesting choice when the rest of the game’s aesthetic and presentation is mostly the same from the previous one.
Put bluntly, Vampire Crawlers chokeslams boredom through a glass table. The demo is impressive in its simplicity, but requires a hell of a lot more of you than Vampire Survivors did. In that sense, poncle could be on track to deliver a follow-up worthy of its still budding name and elephantine reputation. Can their lightning strike twice? Well, if they have a duplicator and a lightning ring on, yeah! Beyond that, we’ll find out soon enough as the game is to release in the near future.
You too can experience vampiric euphoria right now by playing the Vampire Crawlers demo on Steam as part of their Next Fest event from February 23 to March 2, or on Xbox. poncle will be releasing the full game on Steam for PC, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and on mobile through Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
Put bluntly, Vampire Crawlers chokeslams boredom through a glass table. The demo is impressive in its simplicity, but requires a hell of a lot more of you than Vampire Survivors did. In that sense, poncle could be on track to deliver a follow-up worthy of its still budding name and elephantine reputation. Can their lightning strike twice?
IIn case you wanted to smash together two of the most addictive games in the last few years for a fast-paced dopamine overload, poncle has got you covered. Yes, it wasn’t enough for Vampire Survivors (their acclaimed action roguelike/bullet heaven game with more Castlevania influence in it than most recent Castlevania games) to have a crossover DLC with Balatro, they had to go and make their own twisted card game that has burned a hole in my eyes with all the excitement and lights you’d expect.
Vampire Crawlers was easily one of my most anticipated indie games of this year ever since it was announced a few months ago. A sequel-spinoff to a game I dumped [redacted] hours into across two platforms? Hell yeah. It has changed though, this time taking the form of a wicked dungeon crawler the Gen Xers and elder millennials will be right at home with if they were slapping keyboards at a young age like me.
Cards so cool, you want to get them professionally graded
Mad Forest and Inlaid Library wasting waves and waves of familiar foes as you navigate a maze collecting powerups, coinage, and elusive whole cooked chickens for health. Your WASD keys move your Crawler from tile to tile, and your Q and E keys turn your view in case you actually want to see where you’re going instead of strafing hip-first into danger. If you want to one-hand it, there’s buttons to click with your mouse to perform these movement actions as well.
Battles are facilitated through cards which are embossed with classic weapons like the whip, King Bible, knife, axe, and utilities like armor and duplicators that give you more attacks per card. You have a set number of mana for each turn and each card has a mana requirement to play, anywhere from 0 to 3 from what I encountered in the demo. This will come pretty naturally to anyone that’s played a similar deck-builder roguelike like Slay the Spire for instance.
The real fun is stacking combos with your cards. Play cards sequentially based on mana cost and the effects of your cards multiply. Turn your cards that give you 6 armor into 18 armor by playing it third in sequence during a turn, or easily get your attack cards into the triple digits for damage by doing the same. If there’s one thing I had to learn quickly to succeed in Vampire Crawlers, it was to strategize with this technique to wipe the screen of enemies and… survive. Don’t depend on low-mana cards or stack your deck with higher-level ones. Balance is key!
Play your Antonio Crawler card, then any red cards in your hand for bonus fun
You level up with gems dropped from slain enemies just like Vampire Survivors, and each level-up offers an opportunity for big gains, namely adding a new card to your deck or a gem you can stamp onto an existing card with an empty gem slot, complete with an animation of a smithy’s hammer blasting that thing onto the card. Gems can provide many modifiers like doubling the damage a card does, making the card return immediately to your hand for a second salvo, or giving you armor. Ever whip five bats in the mouth and then get +3 armor for the occasion? You can here.
Once you get the hang of everything, battles really start to lean in your favor, but they’re not without challenge. Encounters can be decently long with hordes of enemies swarming you to chip away at your health without proper defensive cards. If luck isn’t on your side, you just have to eat some damage and hope you can find a candelabra around the map housing, somehow, a succulent chicken for you. Each map consists of multiple floors and increasingly tough fights so moderation is key–don’t be like me and try to beat every encounter on every floor and expect to complete the run without properly upgrading your Crawlers.
And damn is it fun to upgrade and reap the rewards of your murderous sowing. You have a cornucopia of permanent stat boosts and other modifiers to give you a long-term edge against every horror-based horror you come up against, slowly but surely earned and pushing you to make new runs until your sleep schedule is upended. Unlock new Crawlers too and take their unique ability cards into the fray to see who you mesh with best. If the final roster is anything like Vampire Survivors, then you could make a part-time job out of experimenting with the heaps of characters on offer.
This screen legally qualifies as a drug in some territories
My immediate concerns are mostly nitpicky and nothing that poncle can’t iron out between now and release. Sometimes I’d nuke a monster so hard that its body would persist in the encounter, though perform no additional actions and it did disappear once I finished and went back to the exploring phase of the run. The volume is also wildly mixed to me. Opening a chest at the game’s default 100% sound effects volume was like being at a sound check at a stadium concert. Even lowering it to 75%, the more noisy and celebratory moments threatened to kick my ears off my head. Aside from those, translating the fun I had in this demo to a full game will all depend on the breadth of content: cards, characters, locales, the gameplay loop holding up over time, and any other surprises that elicit intrigue in my overstimulated brain.
I’m also not entirely sold on the increased effort of production that’s in Vampire Crawlers. There’s now voice acting in the game, in this demo consisting of little call-outs and banter from your Crawler while playing certain cards. It’s not very intrusive and obviously mutable if you desire, but just an interesting choice when the rest of the game’s aesthetic and presentation is mostly the same from the previous one.
Put bluntly, Vampire Crawlers chokeslams boredom through a glass table. The demo is impressive in its simplicity, but requires a hell of a lot more of you than Vampire Survivors did. In that sense, poncle could be on track to deliver a follow-up worthy of its still budding name and elephantine reputation. Can their lightning strike twice? Well, if they have a duplicator and a lightning ring on, yeah! Beyond that, we’ll find out soon enough as the game is to release in the near future.
You too can experience vampiric euphoria right now by playing the Vampire Crawlers demo on Steam as part of their Next Fest event from February 23 to March 2, or on Xbox. poncle will be releasing the full game on Steam for PC, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and on mobile through Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
by David Rodriguez
