As 2026 gets into its home stretch, I’ve found myself reflecting on all the games I’ve enjoyed so far this year. One game in particular has held up as a genuine best-of-the-year, despite releasing in April and summarily getting followed by a months-long stretch of instant classics. Yes, I’m talking about Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard From Vampire Survivors.
I know that for sure thanks to Vampire Crawlers’ new mobile port, which brings the deckbuilding roguelike to iPhone and iPad today. It turns out that Poncle’s Vampire Survivors spinoff still very much has me enthralled, which is a problem now that I have it in my pocket at all times. Vampire Crawlers takes the fundamental ideas of Vampire Survivors and remixes them into a very different kind of game.
It’s a deckbuilding dungeon crawler where you try to put together a synergistic collection of attacks, stat boosts, and defensive maneuvers, and use them to wipe out waves of monsters in turn-based battles. The trick is that cards become more powerful if you play them in ascending order of cost. You need to play the hand you’re dealt carefully each time to hit an order of operations that maximizes damage.
I didn’t fully understand the nuances of that system when I started playing it back in April. I felt like I didn’t have a lot of options when it came to playing cards, as I’d always want to count up in cost from 0. It took me a while to understand how to build a deck around creating longer, more consistent runs.
Soon enough, I learned how to draft new cards to keep my odds of achieving an unbroken run up. I began modifying the cost of cards, both making some intentionally more expensive and others into negative cost cards that actually gave me mana back, in order to extend combos even further. Once I cracked how to reverse a run to count down instead of up, I found myself making big-brain plays that had me doing 10x combos consistently.
There is way more depth to Crawlers than is first apparent, which makes starting from scratch on a new platform appealing. When I first played Vampire Survivors in April, my immediate reaction was that I needed a mobile version of it. Both Vampire Survivors and Balatro arguably reached their full potential on mobile platforms, and Crawlers felt like an obvious port given that it's an unholy merger of the two.
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