Vampire Crawlers is perfect

The original Vampire Survivors hooked me in a way that very few early access titles have gotten me before. It had me logging on for every update, getting every new achievement, and then marking my calendar for two weeks later when the next batch of achievements would, inevitably, drop.

Alas, the problem with a game like Vampire Survivors is that it eventually becomes solved. The game is still amazing and it has loads of super fun content to play, but the mystery is almost entirely gone for me. I can’t help but long for a simpler Vampire Survivors, when the most you could hope for would be to discover a new weapon evolution each run. But such is the bitterness of games like Vampire Survivors – you can only truly experience it once.

Vampire Crawlers, on the other hand, is something I did not really want, or was at least skeptical about – despite it also being developed by poncle, who created Survivors. Vampire Survivors as a card-based, deckbuilding roguelite? A game that essentially spawned a genre transformed into the exact type of game that Steam is flooded with right now? No thanks.

Well, whoever typed that last paragraph is an idiot, I’m pleased to say, because Vampire Crawlers not only perfectly captures the feel of playing Vampire Survivors (despite it now being a card game), it also captures that sense of discovery that I’ve longed for for years.

The gist of Vampire Crawlers is pretty simple. You’ve got cards, and the cards are based off of all the passive and active items in Vampire Survivors. Cards cost mana. You spend mana on the cards to defeat enemies or block damage. You get XP for winning fights. You pick new cards each time you level up. Makes sense. 

But what really helps transform Vampire Crawlers into something both fascinating and delightful is the combo system, the exploration, and the many hidden interactions that helped define Vampire Survivors in 2022. 

Early on in the Vampire Crawlers demo (which hit as part of the Feb. 2026 Steam Next Fest), you get a Relic that gives you a combo system. When you play cards in order of their mana cost, each card played in the combo gets a multiplicative bonus. This counts for damage, sure, but it also includes things like additional mana gains, additional projectiles granted, additional armor, and more. This creates a really fun skill ceiling for building your deck, where spreading mana costs is key, but so is ensuring you have plenty of mana to spend, and a hand size large enough to play all the kinds of cards you want.

Pair that with the exploration – where you move from encounter to encounter using the arrow keys – and you have a real hit on your hands. Not only are there weird events found in each “floor” of each level in Vampire Crawlers, but there are additional bosses and chests as well. This finally rounds us out to the hidden interactions, as there are chests that can contain evolutionary upgrades for cards as long as you have the correct pair. And yes, your knowledge of Vampire Survivors’ evolutions will help you immensely here.

Vampire Crawlers has absolutely consumed me since Next Fest hit. I’m supposed to be playing a bunch of different demos for Steam Next Fest, but I have not only exhausted all of the upgrades and combos in Vampire Crawlers, I’ve played it for three of my last 24 hours. That’s too much time on a demo for a game that has no release date.

I don’t know when Vampire Crawlers will come out, but I am devastated that the answer is not “today.” It’s certainly the game from this Next Fest that I’ve devoted the most time to, and it’ll be the game I spend the next few months thinking about every time I open Steam and can’t play it.