Vampire Crawlers

Hey, You Got Your Dungeon Crawler in My Vampire Survivors

This is the best game that has ever existed, or will ever exist.

Hyperbole aside, damn did this thing hit me when I needed it, well done poncle. I've got SO MUCH going on right now my brain is fried by nightfall and I needed a pick-up-and-go game that I could vibe with that still had some strat meat and this thing fits the bill.

Vampire Crawlers is a roguelike deckbuilder from the team behind the much beloved Vampire Survivors bullet heaven, or horde survivor, or OG Survivors-like, or whatever you wanna call it.

Deckbuilding is my favorite card game mechanic and I've played quite a few of these. Crawlers takes the iconography, hyperkinetic bling, combo-based strategy, and achievement storm that is VS and slams it into a deckbuilder fighting mechanic with dungeon crawler map navigation. The game is fun and fast-paced, and if you're familiar with VS, the icons and combos will click early-on. Evolutions create powerful new cards, and chaining combos for damage boosts is ridiculously satisfying. Hitting treasure chests is rewarding, bashing candlesticks and pillars for coins is fun, and the ability to apply gems to cards to upgrade them in a variety of ways is frankly brilliant.

Normally in these types of games, you upgrade a card to a better card. Here the player is given an option of gems that can be "hammered" into gem slots available on each card, meaning you could have a handful of holy bible starter cards with no two being quite the same. I have not seen this in a deckbuilder before, and letting players build their own cards as well as their own decks is A+. Once you start getting the hang of different strategies, every card has the potential to be a good card, and every gem has potential relative to your current run. "All power ups are good power ups" was one of the big boons of VS, and it's lovely to see the sentiment carried over here.

Deckbuilder is a saturated genre and I gotta give the devs credit for making this game feel like a unique play experience. I have never played a game quite like this. I love VS, and I appreciate those sweet vibes are getting overlaid, but lads there's genuinely a lot to love here. From the old-school dungeon crawler graphics and retro dialogue sfx to the unlockable QOL enhancements and the knowledge this here is a poncle game so you're gonna have like 30 characters to play, it's a banger all around.

We're in it now, lads.

There's an echo gem effect that allows the card to repeat the previous attack, and it was a beast on Pugnala's level-3 revolver Phiera Der Tuphello. Pgunala starts with Spellbinder, which has got to be one of the most useful starter deck cards you can have for a crawler with a yellow-card trigger to draw, because if you snatch up a few level-1 mana tomes you will consistently hit the spellbinder-tome-2gun-3gun combo, and with echo on top it was just a really good time.

Spellbinder and Unholy Bible can evolve into Vespers, which is a cool card, but in the future I wouldn't sacrifice Spellbinder until I had at least 2 of them or a handful of yellow 0 cards. I haven't unlocked Spellbinder for pickups yet, according to the wiki I need to play runetracer 10 times which I evidently haven't done. Consulting the wiki leads down a rabbit hole... I need Pasqualinia at level 10 to unlock runetracer, and to do that I need to get Imelda to level 20 in the library. I can't remember who I've unlocked but unlocking spellbinder is my next session goal.

Surprise rave at the tavern! This game keeps giving and giving.

I gave Giovanna a try and was pleasantly surprised how much damage her cats do. I stacked her luck pretty high but it appears the main thing it does is increase potential card draws and gem draws which is cool, but not as useful as some of the other Crawlers's color draw stats.

I keep forgetting to use rerolls, so I'm trying to get better about using that strategically.

I did a lazy L1 run with Mortaccio and absolutely wiped the floor using Bones. By the end of the run, I was really wishing I could at least have a go at the reaper when it showed up and hacked me to pieces. I did a search and figured out there's a boss called Red Death down the road, so I have that to look forward to.

Nearly beat the bridge with one of the mages, failed, and used the bone guy to wipe the floor. I unlocked a few relics there, including the Blacksmith, which allows you to pay to add gem slots to cards (max 3), and overkill, which is just a fun way to chuck your remaining cards at a boss for extra coins.

Gettin my butt kicked at the dairy yeeah. Playing the cleric was interesting. I (sorta) effed up by evolving my holy water too early (to 4-pt), leaving me with a 3-point card gap for a while. Starting deck is an easy 0-1-2-3 otherwise. Would cleric again however.

I've been killing it with Ramba lately and focusing on getting gold for perma upgrades. I've begun to see more wild cards and I'm getting a bit savvier about using them, and about holding yellow permanent boost cards until I can get a significantly high combo. Which can be challenging sometimes, because a high combo has a higher likelihood of clearing the encounter before you can apply the upgrade.

Killing it at the milk factory, working on meta. My ability to chain is greatly improving. Pugnala has a simply ridiculous starting hand, and once you start getting crawler bonuses they just keep stacking, so the draw on yellow ability lasts the whole run. I've tried to avoid strategy tips so I can discover for myself, but I unlocked Poppea and I do know she's a good 'un.

Whenever the reaper comes for me, it hits for 333. If I survive that hit, do I get a chance to fight it? Something to quietly ponder as I go about my day.

I reached the point where I can construct apparently game-breaking combos.... only to find it's part of the gameplay. After cards are reused a certain number of times per fight, they start to crack. If you continue using them and they break, reapers come for you. This prevents the player from maintaining a small cycled hand, and it's pretty cool that "breaking the game" is part of the process.

The "play duplicate cards free" tarot card is crazy, btw.

I'm starting to better understand what I need to do to prepare for the reaper, and wild cards are making it possible to actually get big HP boosts from hollow heart cards and things like that. So far, I've only lasted for a few seconds, but I'll get there.

I officially beat the game a few days ago, but I started a new game now that I have Improved Skillz and continue to poke at it because I don't have the bandwidth for anything else. You reach a point where you can increase and decrease the probability of card draws, and things started to get really messy and unbalanced for me, so I'm trying to keep this run pretty narrow and focus more on exploring strategies than tinkering with that kind of stuff.