Vampire Crawlers

Vampire Crawlers is a roguelike deck-building game based on characters, weapons and other concepts from Vampire Survivors. Players start in a village and select one of several combatants ("crawlers") which starts with a basic deck of cards that favor certain weapons or abilities. The player can then select to travel to one of several regions each representing a dungeon, several which have multiple levels with different difficulties.

On entering a dungeon, the game switches to a simple first-person view of the dungeon similar to early computer role-playing games. The player has a map showing all encounters on the dungeon floor include a boss that blocks the exit to the next floor. Beating encounters earns the player experience points, and as they level up, they get the option to add a new card to their deck. New cards also can be found in chests through a dungeon, along with gold, healing items, and other treasures.

Luca "poncle" Galante released Vampire Survivors in October 2022 as a solo project, wherein its success, critically and financially, allowed Galante to establish poncle as a studio. Though the studio had initially established "poncle presents" as a publishing label to support other indie titles, by April 2026, the studio had shifted focus to both spin-offs and licensed variations of Vampire Survivors, along with new intellectual properties.

Galante felt that there was much he could reuse from Vampire Survivors in terms of the characters, weapons, and other assets to develop more games. Early on, there were five separate projects in development, with poncle working with other indie studios to create prototypes for game in other genres related loosely to the content from Vampire Survivors, include a role-playing game. One of the directions Galante said he wanted to do was to "take an existing genre and try to remove everything I usually find frustrating about it".

Vampire Crawlers received "generally favorable" reviews according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received "mighty" approval, being recommended by 93% of critics with an average rating of 84/100.