Vampire Crawlers: A New Dungeon Crawling Roguelite Deckbuilder Coming in 2026

Deal world-ending combos and blitz through infested dungeons

Announced at today's Xbox Event, Vampire Crawlers is a brand new game from Poncle, the team that brought us Vampire Survivors. The game is a casual, turn-based deckbuilder with roguelite elements.

As you may expect, being announced at Xbox, Vampire Crawlers will indeed be available day 1 on Xbox Game Pass, though no release date is currently announced, only that it will be in 2026 "when it is ready".

How Does Vampire Crawlers Relate to Vampire Survivors?

Everything! No, seriously. This game takes place in the exact same world as Vampire Survivors sharing the same characters, items, and even jokes. The only difference is this is a new genre of game in which you will pick a character crawl a dungeon, exploring it while you build and customize a deck of attacks and utilities. You'll use your deck to take part in what has been described as "high-speed, high-chaos card battles".

The game will definitely be chaotic if the preview video is even a tenth accurate to what we'll see on release, but it was stated in an interview that we will see players being able to explore the game at their own pace; you can play cards as fast as humanly possible or you can take your time and think about your plays.

Cards can also be customized in the game which will allow you to augment them. The system for this has been described as being "flexible" so that players can dig into it as much or as little as they want.

Poncle decided to stay in the Vampire Survivors world because ultimately, the lore of the game has huge value. By reusing it, the developers didn't have to worry about who the characters would be or what items would be in the game, instead focusing purely on the gameplay.

Vampire Crawlers Has Been in the Works for 4 Years

Shortly after the massive success of Vampire Survivors, work began on Vampire Crawlers. Luca, CEO and Founder of Poncle, had this to day about the development.

Quote From Luca

The project started very early – shortly after the initial success of Vampire Survivors, I was already thinking of getting in touch with other indie studios to start working on spin-offs. This means that it is something that has effectively been in the works for almost 4 years!  

We’ve been calling these “experiments”, and Vampire Crawlers was the one that immediately hit its goal. Even in the prototype phase, you could tell the game had legs. It’s the one that proceeded faster than any other, which is why it’s the first one we’re seeing. 

Will Vampire Crawlers Get Consistent Updates?

Yes. The team has more ideas to expand the game further and it has been built to allow for more content to be added. Feedback from the community will help decide what kind of new things to add to Vampire Crawlers in the future.

There we have it, Vampire Crawlers due for release in 2026.