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In a reveal at Xbox’s Partner Preview showcase on Thursday, Vampire Survivors developer Poncle teased what’s next for the series with a flashy trailer promising “next-gen graphics, an endless open world, compelling storytelling…” before saying, nah, scratch all that. How about more 2D pixel art, but this time in first person?
“Turbo wildcard” Vampire Crawlers, a spin-off coming next year, reinterprets the characters, enemies and items of Vampire Survivors into a deckbuilding dungeon crawler. “It’s about mowing down hordes of enemies using cards, while you explore dungeons, playing as slowly or as fast as you prefer,” Poncle founder Luca told Xbox Wire in an interview ahead of the announcement.
Shortly after the success of Vampire Survivors, Luca “was already thinking of getting in touch with other indie studios to start working on spin-offs,” so the idea behind Vampire Crawlers has been gestating for about four years. He suggests it’s just one of many prototypes they’ve had in development, but the marriage of Vampire Survivors’ spiraling chaos and a first-person roguelike just worked immediately.
“To some people this game will look like a ‘blobber’, a half-unknown genre that used to be very popular on PC in the ’80s, and that nowadays is quite rare to see,” said Luca.
“The user interface, where you explore grid-based dungeons in first person using giant buttons to press on the screen to move, is a rather old concept that we’re marrying with this really fast card-playing game mechanic… What sparked the idea was the fact that in a lot of roguelike games today, you get a rather bare-bones choice-tree that doesn’t feel that interesting anymore. It’s practical, but I wanted to create something just a bit more involved, to give a little more meaning to exploration (just not too much or we’d be walking into RPG territory).”
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You wise PC Gamer readers know all about Eye of the Beholder and Legend of Grimrock, of course. The genre’s still alive: some of the best to ever do it, the Etrian Odyssey series, came to PC just a couple years ago. Luca said that exploration won’t be “a too heavy component” of Vampire Crawlers; the dungeon is really there just to add a bit of structure and provide “more interesting choices about what to do in between fights and to help in giving the feeling that you are moving through a world where a large variety of things could happen, instead of just navigating menus.”
It’s a fun approach: for as many deckbuilders as we’ve seen hit Steam in the last couple years, I haven’t seen one take this form before. It’ll also be pretty cozy to start playing one with a catalog of already familiar items, so you won’t have to learn what a hundred new things do and how they work together. Though knowing Poncle, Vampire Crawlers will probably be chock full of new stuff, too.
A global launch on Xbox and Steam is planned for next year.
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