Today, during Xbox’s latest digital showcase event, Poncle announced Vampire Crawlers, a Vampire Survivors follow-up coming to Xbox and PC in 2026. But instead of being a top-down idle shooter or “reverse bullet hell” game like 2021’s Vampire Survivors, this newly revealed game is a dungeon crawler with roguelike elements and cards.
On November 20, during Xbox’s Partner Preview event, Poncle revealed the first look at Vampire Crawlers. Here’s the trailer, which is filled with a lot of the same enemies, jokes, and chaos you’d expect from Vampire Survivors.
In an Xbox interview with Poncle founder & CEO Luca, the creator behind Vampire Survivors explains that they have been working on this sequel/spin-off for roughly four years, starting work on it shortly after the OG game exploded on Steam. It is one of many possible spin-offs and experiments the team is working on. This just happened to be the first one to “hit its goal,” hence why it’s getting released first in 2026.
When asked what kind of game Vampire Crawlers is, Luca joked that it’s a totally new genre called “Action TurboTurn™ Game (Turbo Turn System).”
“Jokes aside, this game is just a dungeon crawler you play with cards,” admitted Luca. “It’s about mowing down hordes of enemies using cards, while you explore dungeons, playing as slowly or as fast as you prefer. You can take your time and be tactical, or play cards as fast as you humanly can, because the game is built to always provide accurate logical outcomes, regardless of the visual chaos that your abilities might cause.”
Interestingly, Luca tells Xbox that Vampire Crawlers will launch as a full game, and not in early access, though Poncle does have plans to update it after launch if players like Crawlers and want more content and features.
“Just like Vampire Survivors, we’ve built the game so that it could eventually be expanded,” said Luca. “We’ll leave it to the community to tell us if they want even more, and what they actually want from it going forward.”
Vampire Crawlers launches sometime in 2026 on Xbox, Game Pass, and PC. It will be available day one on Game Pass and will support Xbox Play Anywhere.
