Vampire Crawlers Nails 98% Positive on Steam in 2 Days

"We love card games, but we are not very good at card games. They're complicated. So, we made the game that we wanted to play." That's Poncle chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio speaking to The Game Business about Vampire Crawlers, the studio's deckbuilding spin-off of Vampire Survivors. Two days after launch, it turns out they made a card game plenty of people want to play. The game has racked up over 4,000 Steam reviews with 98% of them positive, earning an Overwhelmingly Positive rating almost immediately.

That kind of review ratio at that volume is rare for any game, let alone a spin-off in a genre its creators openly admit they're not experts in. A concurrent player peak of 40,802 on Steam doesn't hurt either., Vampire Survivors itself peaked at 77,061 back in 2022. A spin-off pulling more than half its parent game's all-time peak within 48 hours is a serious result.

15 Projects, Not 15 Games

The timing couldn't be better for Poncle. In the same Game Business interview, Sapio revealed the studio now has 15 projects in active development, though Poncle was quick to clarify on X that these are projects, not individual games. "We're working on 15 projects, not 15 games," the studio posted. "This includes Vampire Survivors, DLCs, free updates, our published games, etc." The distinction matters. Poncle's roadmap includes Vampire Survivors spin-offs like Crawlers, Survivors-branded games set in other franchises like the recently announced Warhammer Survivors, and two entirely new IPs. To support all of it, the studio is opening offices in Japan and Italy, built around small teams of five to 15 people.

Sapio's description of Poncle's approach is refreshingly honest for a studio riding this much momentum. "We don't want to be AAA or AA," he said. "We're efficient with costs. We don't take useless risks. We invest in people. So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that." I wish more studios with a hit game on their hands talked like this instead of immediately chasing scale. Poncle has also paused its third-party publishing arm after releasing Kill the Brickman and Berserk or Die, with Sapio calling those efforts "a learning experience" and admitting the studio wasn't able to give those games the support they deserved. That's a level of self-awareness you almost never hear from a company in growth mode.

What strikes me about Vampire Crawlers' reception is how cleanly it sidesteps the usual spin-off trap. When a studio takes a beloved game and pivots to a different genre, the result is usually either a watered-down version of both things or something that alienates the original fanbase. Crawlers seems to have done neither. Steam reviews are full of players calling it as engrossing as Vampire Survivors itself, with one top review warning that it's "a time travel machine that warps you forward 20 hours in the future despite playing only one session." Another reviewer went further, claiming two hours of Crawlers was more fun than 20 hours of Slay the Spire 2.

That comparison is going to sting. Slay the Spire 2 dropped to a 66% positive lifetime review score on Steam after its first major update this week, and Vampire Crawlers launching into a 98% positive rating at the exact same moment is brutal timing for MegaCrit. I don't think Poncle planned it that way, but the contrast is impossible to ignore. When a studio that says "we are not very good at card games" ships a deckbuilder that players are rating higher than the genre's most anticipated sequel, something has gone very right for one team and very wrong for another.

Vampire Crawlers is available now on Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. Vampire Survivors has now passed 27 million players, according to Sapio's comments at London Games Festival.