What Did We Play Yesterday?

This is the best game that has ever existed, or will ever exist.

Hyperbole aside, damn did this thing hit me when I needed it, well done poncle. I've got SO MUCH going on right now my brain is fried by nightfall and I needed a pick-up-and-go game that I could vibe with that still had some strat meat and this thing fits the bill.

Vampire Crawlers is a roguelike deckbuilder from the team behind the much beloved Vampire Survivors bullet heaven, or horde survivor, or OG Survivors-like, or whatever you wanna call it.

Deckbuilding is my favorite card game mechanic and I've played quite a few of these. Crawlers takes the iconography, hyperkinetic bling, combo-based strategy, and achievement storm that is VS and slams it into a deckbuilder fighting mechanic with dungeon crawler map navigation. The game is fun and fast-paced, and if you're familiar with VS, the icons and combos will click early-on. Evolutions create powerful new cards, and chaining combos for damage boosts is ridiculously satisfying. Hitting treasure chests is rewarding, bashing candlesticks and pillars for coins is fun, and the ability to apply gems to cards to upgrade them in a variety of ways is frankly brilliant.

Normally in these types of games, you upgrade a card to a better card. Here the player is given an option of gems that can be "hammered" into gem slots available on each card, meaning you could have a handful of holy bible starter cards with no two being quite the same. I have not seen this in a deckbuilder before, and letting players build their own cards as well as their own decks is A+. Once you start getting the hang of different strategies, every card has the potential to be a good card, and every gem has potential relative to your current run. "All power ups are good power ups" was one of the big boons of VS, and it's lovely to see the sentiment carried over here.

Deckbuilder is a saturated genre and I gotta give the devs credit for making this game feel like a unique play experience. I have never played a game quite like this. I love VS, and I appreciate those sweet vibes are getting overlaid, but lads there's genuinely a lot to love here. From the old-school dungeon crawler graphics and retro dialogue sfx to the unlockable QOL enhancements and the knowledge this here is a poncle game so you're gonna have like 30 characters to play, it's a banger all around.

We're in it now, lads.

There's an echo gem effect that allows the card to repeat the previous attack, and it was a beast on Pugnala's level-3 revolver Phiera Der Tuphello. Pgunala starts with Spellbinder, which has got to be one of the most useful starter deck cards you can have for a crawler with a yellow-card trigger to draw, because if you snatch up a few level-1 mana tomes you will consistently hit the spellbinder-tome-2gun-3gun combo, and with echo on top it was just a really good time.

Spellbinder and Unholy Bible can evolve into Vespers, which is a cool card, but in the future I wouldn't sacrifice Spellbinder until I had at least 2 of them or a handful of yellow 0 cards. I haven't unlocked Spellbinder for pickups yet, according to the wiki I need to play runetracer 10 times which I evidently haven't done. Consulting the wiki leads down a rabbit hole... I need Pasqualinia at level 10 to unlock runetracer, and to do that I need to get Imelda to level 20 in the library. I can't remember who I've unlocked but unlocking spellbinder is my next session goal.