Vampire Crawlers First Impressions: Poncle Did It Again

You know what? It's been a long time since I booted up a game and immediately felt like the people who made it actually cared about what I was looking at.

Vampire Crawlers launched today. And I can't lie, I expected to like it. What I didn't expect was how fast it would sink its teeth into me. Not because of some complex progression system or because the numbers get big (they do, and it's hilarious). But because the second you load into your first dungeon, everything about this game just feels right. The pixel art. The card animations. The way the camera moves through these corridors like you're playing a lost Castlevania spinoff from an alternate timeline where someone handed the series to a genius with zero budget and unlimited taste.

And that's exactly what happened, by the way. That's not even a hypothetical.

What Vampire Crawlers Actually Is

Let me set this up for the uninitiated. Vampire Crawlers is not Vampire Survivors 2. poncle has been pretty clear about that. This is a spin-off. The first in what they're hoping becomes a whole series of them. The idea is to take the DNA of Vampire Survivors, the snowballing chaos, the dopamine hits, the "just one more run" pull, and graft it onto a completely different genre.

In this case, the genre is the blobber. If that word means nothing to you, think Wizardry. Think old-school first-person dungeon crawlers where you navigate grid-based corridors, bump into monsters, and try not to die. Except poncle did something clever with it. They kept the first-person dungeon crawling but replaced the traditional combat with a turn-based deckbuilding system built around something they're calling the Turboturn.

Here's how that works. You play cards in ascending mana order. Each card you chain into the next one amplifies the effect. So a zero-cost whip card followed by a one-cost fire wand hits harder than the fire wand alone. Wild cards let you extend the combo chain further. Before you know it you're stacking 10, 15, 20 cards deep and the screen is just exploding with damage numbers and particle effects and you're laughing because how did a $10 game just do that.

That's poncle. That's always been poncle.

The Art Style Is the Point

And here's the thing. I know the reviews are going to focus on the deckbuilding mechanics. They're going to talk about the combo system and the Turboturn and whether the dungeon layouts are varied enough. And that's fine. But what I want to talk about is what this game looks like. Because I think that's where the real story is.

Vampire Crawlers is gorgeous. Not in the way that a $200 million AAA game is gorgeous, where everything is photorealistic and ray-traced and you need a $2,000 GPU to run it at a respectable framerate. Gorgeous in the way that makes you remember why you fell in love with games in the first place. The pixel art in this game is warm. It's detailed without being cluttered. It's got this retro Castlevania energy that somehow feels both nostalgic and completely fresh at the same time.

The dungeons are dark and moody but they never lose that signature Vampire Survivors playfulness. You're exploring corridors that feel like they belong in a proper gothic horror game, but then you headbutt a chest and gems fly out and a little jingle plays and you're grinning. The contrast is the whole vibe. It's creepy and fun at the same time, and that balance is really hard to pull off.

I keep going back to this thought. The entire game is one megabyte. One. The whole thing. Meanwhile I've downloaded shader packs for AAA games that are larger than this entire experience. And somehow Vampire Crawlers looks better than half of them. Not technically. Artistically. There's a difference, and that difference matters more than this industry wants to admit.

The first-person perspective changes everything about how you experience the Vampire Survivors aesthetic. Enemies that used to be tiny sprites swarming you from a top-down view are now right in your face. The library levels, the dungeon corridors, the cloud stages (yes, you dig through the floor and end up in the clouds, because of course you do). Every environment feels like it was designed by someone who sat down and asked two questions.

Is it fun? Is it cool?

If the answer to both was yes, it made the cut. If not, it got scrapped. That's game design driven by taste, not by market research. And you can feel it in every single pixel.

The Soundtrack Deserves Its Own Conversation

I'm going to say it. poncle got Yoko Shimomura to compose the main theme for this game. Let that sink in. The woman behind the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack. Street Fighter II. Final Fight. Legend of Mana. One of the most legendary composers in video game history wrote the main theme for a $10 indie dungeon crawler.

The track is called "Il Cuor non si Spaura." I had to look up what that means because my Italian is nonexistent. It translates roughly to "The Heart Does Not Fear." And honestly? That might as well be the tagline for poncle's entire approach to making games. No fear. No hedging. No chasing what's safe.

The rest of the soundtrack is handled by Daniele Zandara, Filippo Vicarelli, and Michael Coviello. And I can't lie, the whole OST hits. It has that same energy that made the Vampire Survivors soundtrack such a sleeper favorite. Music that feels way too good for a game at this price point. Music that has no business going this hard. But it does. Because these guys care.

Credit Where Credit's Due

I talk a lot on this site about the things the gaming industry gets wrong. The overpriced launches. The half-finished products. The live service graveyard. And I'm going to keep doing that because somebody has to.

But this is one of those times where I need to flip the script and give credit where credit's due.

poncle did not have to make this game. Vampire Survivors sold over 7.8 million copies on Steam alone. Luca Galante went from unemployed and making a game on an $1,100 budget to winning three BAFTAs. Three. Beating out AAA games with marketing budgets bigger than most people's mortgages. He could have coasted. He could have made Vampire Survivors 2 with slightly better graphics and charged $20 and nobody would have blinked. Nobody would have even blamed him.

Instead, he went sideways. He partnered with Nosebleed Interactive. He picked a completely different genre. He kept the price at $9.99. He put it on Game Pass day one. He got Yoko Shimomura to write the main theme. He made sure it had ultrawide support on PC at launch, which is something that billion-dollar studios still fumble on a regular basis. And the whole game is one megabyte.

That tells you everything you need to know about what this guy's priorities are. They're not shareholder priorities. They're player priorities. They're gamer priorities. He's building stuff that he would want to play, at a price he would want to pay, with a level of care that reflects how much he respects the people who show up for his work.

That is absurdly refreshing. That is the opposite of what most of this industry looks like right now.

The Small Stuff That Tells the Big Story

You know what got me? The ultrawide support. I know that sounds like a weird thing to fixate on, but hear me out.

Big studios. Major publishers. Companies with thousands of employees and budgets north of $100 million. These guys regularly launch PC games without ultrawide support. Without proper key rebinding. Without basic accessibility features. And they charge $70 for the privilege.

Vampire Crawlers launched today with ultrawide support, full controller support, Steam Deck Verified status, and it runs at 60fps on a Nintendo Switch. For ten dollars. From a small team. On day one.

That's not just a nice touch. That's a statement. That's poncle telling you that respecting the player isn't something you get around to after launch. It's something you ship with. End of story.

And the demo? They released it during Steam Next Fest back in February and pulled over 3,000 concurrent players. They're keeping the demo available even after launch. Your save data carries over. Who does that anymore? Who gives you a free, permanent demo of a game that already costs less than a fast food meal?

People who actually like their players. That's who.

Is It Perfect?

Not every reviewer is in love with this thing. PC Gamer's take was that the deckbuilding gets repetitive and the combo strategy can feel like the only viable approach for too long before the game opens up. That's a fair criticism. Some of the early runs can feel like you're doing the same thing over and over before the card variety kicks in and the real depth reveals itself.

And I get that. The first hour or two, the strategy is pretty straightforward. Play cards in order. Stack combos. Win. It's not until you start unlocking more characters, more card types, more evolution paths that the deckbuilding starts to feel like there are genuine choices to make.

But here's the thing. That's how Vampire Survivors worked too. The first few runs of Vampire Survivors were dead simple. Walk around. Pick stuff up. Watch things die. The magic came from the layers that revealed themselves the more you played. Vampire Crawlers does the same thing. It just asks for a little more patience upfront before the system clicks.

Once it clicks? That's WILD. The combo chains. The card evolutions. The way you can summon actual Vampire Survivors characters as cards that trigger cascading effects. The game breaks itself on purpose and invites you to break it even further. That is pure poncle DNA right there.

The Bottom Line

Vampire Crawlers is available right now on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch for $9.99. It's on Game Pass day one. There's a free demo if you want to try before you buy.

Is it as groundbreaking as Vampire Survivors was? Probably not. Lightning in a bottle is called that for a reason. But is it fun? Absolutely. Is it cool? Without question. Does it respect your time, your wallet, and your intelligence? In every possible way.

And honestly? In 2026, that's more than enough. That's more than most games can say.

Go play Vampire Crawlers. Headbutt some chests. Stack some combos. Let the pixel art wash over you. And then come tell me this isn't one of the best ten-dollar purchases you've made all year.

I'll wait.

If you're interested in Co-op games with friends, we have a best of list so far for 2026 here!