I wasn’t exactly a model fan of Vampire Survivors, Poncle’s 2022 reverse bullet hell. I absolutely loved its strangely Zen blend of chaos and strategy and mindlessness, but I never got great at the strategy part. I’m not by nature a min-maxxer, and I tend to get a bit overwhelmed when a game has too many stats, instead picking some power or combo I like and sticking with it even if it isn’t ideal. So far, followup game Vampire Crawlers is giving me the same things I loved and the same things I’m less passionate about, but with a slower pace that’s helping me get more into the strategy mindset.
Vampire Crawlers (full title: Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard From Vampire Survivors, and out now for PC and consoles) is developed with a studio called Nosebleed Interactive. You still traverse areas like a forest and a library, and you’re still levelling up all the time. But it turns Vampire Survivors into a first-person, deck-based dungeon crawler: each turn, you have a certain amount of mana to spend playing cards that can do damage, give you armor, boost your other cards, and more. As you play, you get new cards or the opportunity to tinker with your current cards to make them more powerful.
The key thing to think about here is combos, in particular the order you play your cards in. If you play them in ascending order of mana cost (0, 1, 2, etc), you’ll run up a streak that boosts the next costliest card. It’s not always the move–sometimes a nasty boss required me to ignore the combo in favor of piling on my armor, or I was me about a turn and just couldn’t resist a powerful card even if it broke my combo–but it was always on my mind as I chose my plays. This can feel a little rote at times, or at least in the early game where I still am, but I also felt like it helped guide my decision-making a little more than my long-running natural tendency to just start clicking instead of taking my time.
Like Vampire Survivors, there’s a meta-game, though this time it’s laid out in an interface charmingly stylized like a village. You can spend the gold you earn during runs on permanent power-ups and on characters with unique abilities. There’s a world of things to unlock and combine and tinker with, and I get the sense this will all become vital as the difficulty ramps up.
You could argue there’s something a little disappointing there, an encouragement to replay and grind for coins and levels that could start to drag when combined with Vampire Crawlers’ slower pace. In Survivors, the chaos of the game distracted me from all this–every level, even if I’d seen it all before, was fast and exciting, so it never felt like I was just doing the same thing over and over, even though I was arguably doing less than I do in Crawlers. But so far, I’m finding it a good balance: Even if I’m playing a level again, I’m still excited about which cards I’ll get and which order I’ll play them in and what I can do to boost a hand. It feels like there’s a little more to do in each turn of each run, combined with the primordially satisfying flood of damage and XP. And there’s still the pleasantly thoughtless allure of “one more battle” and “one more level” that made Survivors such a particular mix of complexity and ease.
Similar to Balatro, I think one of the core appeals of Survivors and now Crawlers is sort of “breaking” the game–getting so strong and pulling down such big combos that the whole thing becomes an overpowered exercise in absurdity. It’s a strange kind of mastery when compared to other games that require more personal skill, and it’s one I find both appealing and a little hollow. I’m not sure I’ll ever have the kind of brain that will get me there before other games pull me away–the ability to develop an encyclopedic understanding of Crawlers’ trinkets and stats and combos–but so far it feels more achievable for me in Crawlers than in Survivors given its slower pace.
Vampire Crawlers keeps the core hook and essential structure of Survivors while doing its own unique thing with its own particular rhythm. I can see it joining the rotation of games I play when it’s a little too soon to go to bed, but without the adrenaline rush of Survivors that made it not great for actually going to bed. I spent the morning with it and am excited to see more of what it has to offer, even if I’m probably not the kind of person who will ever find my way to its end.
