Vampire Crawlers (Steam Next Fest Demo) – Hands-on Impressions

A new way to drown in bullets

Vampire Survivors works because it turns chaos into a rhythm. Vampire Crawlers tries something bolder: it freezes that chaos, rotates the camera into a first-person dungeon crawler, and asks you to recreate the same absurd power curves using cards and turns. After several full runs of the Steam Next Fest demo, it already feels less like a throwaway spin-off and more like poncle figuring out how to make a deckbuilder feel as immediately compulsive as its predecessor.

The pitch is simple. You lead a party of three through compact, grid-based dungeons, fighting familiar monsters from Vampire Survivors in turn-based battles. Each character has a personal deck and role, but you pilot them all from a classic blobber-style viewpoint, sliding around corridors and popping into fights. What makes it work is the Turboturn system, which quietly tears down most of the genre’s friction.

Turboturn and the pace of chaos

Turn-based dungeon crawlers usually live and die on how much downtime they inflict. Vampire Crawlers barely has any. The Turboturn system lets you queue multiple card plays and actions in quick succession, then resolves them almost instantly. You are still thinking like a tactician, but the execution cadence is closer to a clicker or an auto-battler.

In practice, a typical trash encounter in the demo lasts five to ten seconds of actual animation, but you have already mentally planned three or four micro-turns ahead. You line up a movement card to step your blob back a tile, queue a cross-lane projectile, then drop a delayed area effect that will bloom just as the enemy wave catches up. The game stacks those inputs and detonates them in order. There is no waiting on elaborate spell windups or camera cuts, the turn just explodes and you are immediately ready to queue the next one.

The result sits in an interesting middle ground. It never reaches the fully unhinged visual blizzard of Vampire Survivors, but the tempo is much closer to that than to something like Wizardry or Legend of Grimrock. Encounters string together quickly, and the short travel distances between fights keep you in a near-constant battle-state. It is not quite the same trance that comes from orbiting a 2D arena for 30 minutes, but the demo proves the basic idea: Turboturn can sustain a fast, snacky loop even inside a fundamentally turn-based framework.

First-person blobber, light exploration

The dungeon layer is deliberately light. You slide in 90-degree increments through straightforward corridors peppered with treasure chests, event nodes, and optional fights. The Steam page and pre-demo interviews made it clear that exploration was never meant to be the star, and the demo confirms that. Layouts give you occasional route choices, but the most interesting decisions are still about when to risk an extra combat or side room for another relic or card draft.

What the first-person view does buy the game is a new sense of proximity for enemies you already know. Skeleton swarms that were once distant pixel soup now clatter up in your face, and boss-sized threats occupy the entire frame. It leans into the blobber nostalgia without overcomplicating navigation. If you come in expecting puzzles, mapping tricks, or elaborate secrets, you will be disappointed, but as a connective tissue between battles it does its job: keep you moving briskly toward the next opportunity to break the game.

Deckbuilding that wants to be busted

The demo only exposes a slice of the full card pool, yet it already pushes you toward the same escalating nonsense that defines Vampire Survivors. Each crawler has a signature weapon line, passive affinities, and a personal deck that you sculpt over the course of a run. Level-ups and event nodes offer new cards or upgrades, and relics sit over the top as persistent modifiers that twist your deck’s behavior.

What stands out is how aggressively the game enables synergies. Even in the opening hours, you can assemble loops that feel one balance patch away from being banned. A simple example from the demo: a frontliner whose default attack hits a column of enemies, combined with a relic that refunds energy on overkill, plus a card that copies the last attack played on a different lane. Once your damage numbers cross a certain threshold, that trio flips from “solid opener” to “delete the screen for free every other turn.”

The important part is how quickly you reach those inflection points. The card rewards are generous, the upgrade costs are forgiving, and the game does not seem especially interested in preserving a sense of restraint. That is very much in line with poncle’s philosophy. The deckbuilding is not about tuning a precise 30-card masterpiece, it is about finding whatever weird loop the game allows and then hammering it until the numbers stop fitting on screen.

There is nuance hidden under the fireworks, though. Certain enemies punish over-reliance on one damage type or row configuration. Elite encounters in the demo introduce armor strips, status ailments, and boss patterns that force you to dedicate slots to cleansing, shielding, or repositioning. You can lean into brute-force DPS, but neglecting control tools does come back to bite you, particularly on higher difficulty toggles.

Party building in a three-lane world

The most pleasant surprise in the demo is how much identity each crawler brings to the party. Rather than one amorphous deck, you are effectively building three intertwined mini-decks that all act across shared enemy lanes. Positioning matters. A backline caster might have powerful line attacks that require enemies to be clumped, while your midline tank has taunts and shields that concentrate incoming damage into one lane.

In the demo roster, you get access to archetypes that map neatly onto familiar roles: the chunky frontliner that scales off taking hits, the glass cannon spell-slinger who stacks crit and status, the support who feeds energy and card draw. The trick is that cards frequently reference other crawlers by position or role, so you are encouraged to think of the party as a combo machine rather than three separate characters.

A support card might give your left ally bonus power whenever they kill something during the next Turboturn resolution. A tank card might let you redirect all damage from the center lane to yourself, then retaliate based on the total mitigated. Because turns resolve in stacked batches, these effects can cascade in satisfying ways. You set up a kill chain on the right lane, redirect all hits into your tank for resource gain, then fire a copied spell from your caster that profits off the whole mess.

The flip side is that party construction feels a bit constrained in the demo. You only have a limited selection of crawlers and very linear unlocks, so most players will gravitate toward one or two obvious synergies. As a taste of what a full roster could unlock, though, it is promising. If poncle delivers a reasonably large cast with sharply differentiated kit gimmicks, the space for party theorycrafting could rival lighter RPGs, not just roguelite deckbuilders.

Does it actually feel like Vampire Survivors?

Mechanically, no. You are not weaving between thousands of projectiles in real time, and runs are carved into discrete encounters rather than one continuous survival clock. Emotionally, though, the demo captures more of that original magic than it has any right to.

The key is how the game handles growth within a single run. Early fights are modest, almost polite. A dozen enemies, a couple of buffs, a relic or two. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, you are queuing Turboturns that juggle damage multipliers, redraws, and board-wide detonations, watching an entire encounter resolve in a kaleidoscope of numbers before your cursor even reaches the end turn button again. It taps the same parts of the brain that light up when a Vampire Survivors run exits the fragile phase and enters the power fantasy endgame.

The presentation helps. Animations are snappy, damage feedback is legible, and the soundscape leans into that familiar arcade noise: crunchy crit pops, satisfying hit confirms, and a soundtrack that ramps alongside the pace of your combos. The UI is dense in screenshots but reasonably readable in motion. Tooltips appear quickly and the card layout communicates cost and effect type without over-explaining.

What it lacks, at least in the demo slice, is the sheer density of on-screen absurdity. Even the greediest decks in the current build top out at “a lot of stuff is happening at once,” not “the concept of framerate is dissolving before my eyes.” That might be a necessary concession to first-person readability and console performance, but players chasing the exact same sensory overload may find Crawlers more measured than expected.

Early replayability: how sticky is the loop?

The Next Fest build is not huge, but it is replayable in the way that matters. A single clear is short enough to fit in a lunch break, and there are already multiple toggles and optional objectives that encourage another go. Higher difficulty settings introduce tougher elite patterns and stingier healing, and there are meta progression unlocks that alter your starting decks or open new relic pools.

Because the card and relic economy is generous, successive runs feel tangibly different even when you follow the same critical path. One attempt might revolve around chaining redraw effects to pseudo-break the hand size limits. Another could lean into damage-over-time stacking, turning every encounter into a race between your poisons and the enemies’ burst. The demo does not have the roguelite breadth of a finished product yet, but it absolutely delivers that “one more run” pull.

The bigger question is long-term depth. A lot of the most broken demo builds come from fairly obvious interactions, and it is not clear yet how wide the card space truly is. If future content mostly adds more of the same types of multipliers, the meta could calcify fast. On the other hand, poncle’s track record with Vampire Survivors is one of post-launch experimentation and gleeful power creep. If that ethos carries forward, Crawlers could become an ongoing sandbox for increasingly deranged deck tech.

Early verdict

Judged solely on this Steam Next Fest snapshot, Vampire Crawlers is already far more than a brand-extension curiosity. The Turboturn system successfully translates some of Vampire Survivors’ immediacy into a format that should have been too slow for it, and the first-person blobber framing gives the hordes a fresh bite.

The demo’s weaknesses are clear. Exploration is thin, party building is only just beginning to show its teeth, and the audiovisual chaos ceiling is lower than the original’s benchmark. Yet the core of the experience, the feeling of sculpting a run from frail beginnings into a borderline broken engine of destruction, is unmistakably intact.

If you loved Vampire Survivors for the way it let you break its rules, the Vampire Crawlers demo is already worth your time. It might not replace the original as your default time sink, but it feels like the start of something that could sit alongside it, not beneath it, in poncle’s growing little universe of beautifully noisy games.