History has shown that we humans like the movement of light – babies, children, teenagers, adults, and even the elderly are drawn to flashing colors with matching rhythmic sounds. It’s why slot machines, televisions, phones, and yes, video games, keep us glued to their presentation. Poncle’s latest game, a first-person dungeon crawler aptly titled Vampire Crawlers, uses these sensations to bring to life its simple but effective deckbuilding roguelite in a way as idiosyncratic as its parallel predecessor, Vampire Survivors. And though I find my enjoyment crossing back and forth between a TikTok-like compulsion (derogatory) and a genuine craving for its one-more-run gameplay (complimentary), there’s no denying the mechanical fun. Selecting cards, routing through dungeons, and killing hundreds of skeletons, zombies, witches, and more from stage to stage is a consistent indulgence.
Booting up Vampire Crawlers is not dissimilar to taking a step into a casino. A barrage of lights, sounds, and tactical buttons and triggers to press and pull demands your attention. Every card, enemy, step (even the bumps into surrounding walls), every thing you do is harmonized into the congratulatory orchestra of sensation that is Vampire Crawlers. And as it ramps up, distinct shimmers of the experience gems you earn and the rhythmic bouncing of the runetracer card attack grow into a cacophony. It’s a discordance I relished in as the notes of destruction I bring to the rows of enemies before me, but it’s an annoying one without the context of my on-screen actions (just ask my wife, who endured a lot of it next to me on the couch). After 20 hours, though, I’ve had enough of these retro tingles, and I prefer Vampire Crawlers with its volume down while watching TV or listening to a podcast.
Perhaps to the dismay of Poncle, playing on mute is a perfectly fine way to enjoy Vampire Crawlers due to its laid-back, almost automechanical nature of engagement. There is strategy involved, especially in the latter stages that test your card combo prowess, but at its most difficult, I’m monitoring the game to ensure what I want to happen does happen, rather than feeling a need to actively participate. Of course, I do take part in every action, in that I must press the buttons to select cards and hit the d-pad to maneuver through libraries, forests, dairy plants, and magical castles, but the thought required to succeed is a far cry from the brain power I used while learning its rules.
By design, Vampire Crawlers is incredibly easy to break. There are a lot of crawlers, which are the player-characters with unique perks and ability triggers, to collect, cards to find and enhance at the blacksmith, Arcana to discover that add new rules to how your on-the-fly deck works, and persistent power-ups to purchase to enhance your dungeon performance. All of these work in tandem to keep each run fresh, interesting, and varied. Sometimes, my crawler-card-arcana-power-up combination fails within minutes. Other times, I clear a stage after an hour of ruthless beatdowns, and in my favorite (but admittedly least engaging) runs, I steamroll through everything thanks to a near-infinite card build that doesn’t let enemy turns happen or another that ensures certain cards fire off dozens of projectiles at once instead of a few. Once you understand how the various pieces work in tandem, putting together a nigh-indestructible build takes very little, losing some engagement in the process.
There’s no real narrative tying everything together beyond taking the fight to the bad guys in some medieval land, but the game doesn’t suffer because of it. If anything, it gets you back into the dungeons sooner, dropping any pretense that you’re here for something beyond making numbers go up so you can see the nice lights and hear the nice sounds again.
Vampire Crawlers elevates an otherwise simple but highly entertaining card game with sensations more reminiscent of a casino (or Vampire Survivors) or the blinding blue light of doomscrolling late at night to create a retro-inspired diversion that’s hard to put down. Its pull is less powerful with its dozen or so stages complete and behind me, but it’s clear that desire to return will never quite let up, lingering, waiting in the gothic wings for one more run.