Slay the Spire, which catalyzed its own genre explosion for roguelike deckbuilders back in 2019, is buzzy again with its sequel in early access, so there’s something appropriate about the timing of new spin-off Vampire Crawlers adapting the original Vampire Survivors into that beloved genre space. That initially seems totally at odds—Vampire Survivors is a twitchy, fast-paced, hypnotic arcade game with minimal inputs and an overwhelming sensory rush from big, flashing numbers and gems flying everywhere, whereas roguelike deckbuilders are methodically turn-based, systemic, and decision-intensive.

Vampire Crawlers deftly bridges that gap, translating the core mechanical and aesthetic ideas of Vampire Survivors into a roguelite deckbuilding dungeon crawler with both style and substance in excess. Historically, genre-shifted spin-off projects like this tend to be of a smaller scale than the core game in the IP, but since Vampire Survivors was initially a solo project by poncle, Vampire Crawlers bucks that trend because it’s been developed by a whole team, and it shows. It’s quite a bit more fully featured at release than its progenitor, from the charm of its immersive first-person menus to the unfolding depths of its mechanical systems.

Up Close and Personal In the original Vampire Survivors, you pick a character that starts with a particular item and stat modification/special ability, and move around a map in top-down 2D with your attacks automatically firing regularly. Waves of enemies of increasing number and strength come at you, dropping experience on death. When you level up, you select one from several items, either strengthening something you already have or adding a new item to your build.

Then it’s a race between the increasing tides of ghoulies and your ability to construct a build that wipes them out at pace, until you either lose or 30 minutes pass and Death shows up to end your run. Vampire Crawlers keeps that same overall shape, but changes perspective, makes it turn-based, and at every point injects more interesting decisions for you to make. It also reuses all of the items, icons, enemies, zones, stats, etc., from Survivors as its raw material, but so totally recontextualized that it feels both cozily familiar and fresh.

You navigate the run from a first-person dungeon crawling perspective akin to classic “blobber” RPGs like the Might & Magic and Wizardry series. Runs through a given level are typically broken up into 5 floors, which you can see on a map in the lower part of your screen labeling the locations of enemies, items, the floor boss, etc. Since you have full knowledge of each floor from the start, you can plot out the order in which you want to tackle things.

In Vampire Survivors, certain upgrade locations are visible from the start, so Crawlers extends that into a more strategic way for you to break down the whole level. The character you choose (here a Crawler) determines your starting deck of 4 cards, one of which is the Crawler themself. These are sort of akin to the eponymous commander cards from Magic: The Gathering’s most popular format.

Crawlers have both an immediate impact on your stats when played and also stay out for a while with an ongoing effect that you typically want to build your deck around, such as drawing a card or boosting a stat whenever you play cards of a particular color. Like Survivors, you can also spend gold earned during runs to unlock new Crawlers and buy permanent stat upgrades, along with new meta-progressions like adding additional improvement slots to cards you’ve unlocked, or selecting Arcana with powerful additional effects on your run. Rising Action The biggest increase in complexity from Survivors to Crawlers comes in combat.

The broad outline will be familiar to anyone who’s played Slay the Spire and its ilk: each turn you have a finite amount of energy with which to play out a hand of cards, discarding any unplayed cards at the end of the turn and drawing a fresh hand, reshuffling your discards back into the deck whenever you run out. Cards include both the familiar weapons of Survivors (daggers, holy water, garlic, etc.) doing damage in vari