THE VAMPIRE CRAWLERS DEMO IS OUT NOW!

The Demo for our upcoming Vampire Survivors spinoff is officially live as part of the Steam Next Fest! Hit the Download Demo button on the widget below to start your first crawl right now.


We are really looking forward to see the craziest combos you can come up with, so be sure to drop your feedback in the Steam Forums or join our Discord! And if you enjoy what you see, please remember to hit that Wishlist button on the main store page, it helps us out a lot.

Go play it, go break it. See you in the dungeon!

---

Sneak peek at Vampire Survivors update 1.15

We're expecting to release the next patch in Q2 this year, since there are major features that require more work and testing compared to the usual content updates, like multiple save slots, content filters, or memory optimisations for low-end machines/devices.

Content-wise instead, this is the list we're working on for 1.15:
- 1 stage
- 2 characters
~ 2 weapons (+evos)
- 3 relics
- 3 Darkanas

If you'd like to try the new features and see the new content early, please join the public-beta branch on Steam as we're going to update it in the following weeks. We're also posting additional teasers in our Discord!

In the meantime, here's a sneak peek at the new stage, The Lycaeum:


And a Spinnn:


But update 1.15 is not the only thing we're working on... This year there's something ominous in the skies of Vampire Survivors 🌕

---

Patch notes for 1.14.111

We've been rolling out several fixes and tweaks since our previous content update, and we still have a few in progress. Here's a list of the most recent changes:
- Fixed requirements for several unlocks in Emerald Diorama and Ante Chamber DLC
- Fixed Ante Chamber weapons not appearing in Adventures
- Fixed some secret spells not working properly
- Fixed some stage-specific achievements triggering from the wrong stage
- Fixed some Adventure Progress entries not being detected
- Fixed Sammy coffin unlock text in Adventure
- Fixed the unlocks related to the ‘Glimmer’ ability of the character ‘Diva No. 5’ are not being unlocked after completing the requirements in online multiplayer mode
- Fixed chests may not spawn where bosses are killed in Westwoods.
- Fixed “Fully Evolve the Super Missile” and “Get the twin dragon to level 6” unlocks
- Player 2 can now transition out of death boss fight fine in online mode
- Fixed Diva No.5 - Virginia Skin Won't Unlock
- Fixed Uppercut a Red Reaper secret doesn't function in online
- Fixed stage specific achievements incorrectly unlocking for newly unlocked stages if their conditions were met during the run where you unlocked the stage
- Fixed Player's online background remains as adventure background, if invited from adventure.
- Highlight weapons owned by all main players in arcana page
- Allow Ameya to pickup cats when they're a follower
- Allow Fake Trio, Slogra and Gaibon, Bonnie and Formina to spawn followers when they're cpus
- Fixed First player character spawns out of map bounds on Party Mode in Astral Stairs
- Fixed After the death fight when it fades to black you are stuck on a black screen rather than going to the credits
- Fixed Client player soft locks, when Host exits character selection before Clients load in fully.
- Making sure join button is selected again when closing the join game error popup after failing to join a game because the specified room didn't exist
- Party mode UI changes
- Fix corner cases where UI would update incorrectly if controllers were added and removed during selections in party mode

2025 wrapup

Hello, yes, look, last year has been an absolute clusterfuck at poncle, but absolutely not nearly enough to stop us 😎
Thank you all for supporting us for yet another year!

No matter how cold and cloudy it gets, it's always summer at poncle. And always Tuesday.
Here's a handy list of what we've been able to unfuck from our big 2025 clusterfuck:

- won a BAFTA for Best Evolving Game
- published the free-from Vampire Survivors Wiki
- poncle presents: Nao Games' Berserk or Die, Doonutsaur's Kill the Brickman
- COLLABS: Rusty's Retirement, Two Point Museum, Mythical Concept STARNAUT
- VS 1.13: The Coop, Emerald Diorama
- VS 1.14: Westwoods, Mazerella, Online Co-op, Ante Chamber, and Ode to Castlevania+
- Super successful VS Board Game Kickstarter
- Live events and an ARG at Lucca Comics, including the poncle Live Orchestra exhibition with Yoko Shimomura
- Vampire Crawlers announced

But enough with laurels, let's talk about 2026!

Let's spill the beans: all poncle projects

As mentioned a few times in the Steam news over the years, we've been busy greenlighting and kickstarting all sorts of projects, but we've always been quite cryptic about them. Remember the "experiments"?
Recently we started to see several fruits of all that work, like bringing VS spin-off concepts to other indie studios to team up together with (like Vampire Crawlers obviously!) or lending the base VS-Engine to other studios we like and that approached us with interesting ideas (like Warhammer Survivors), not to mention all the collabs we managed to put together for fun!

So, we're always at work on Vampire Survivors updates of course, but let's also have a look a bit more in detail about every game project poncle's been cooking outside of the main games:

🦇 VS Spinoffs

Shortly after the initial success of Vampire Survivors, I was already thinking of taking some of the accidental core pillars behind the development of VS and to apply them to existing genres that I personally enjoy. Pillars like accessibility, immediacy, lightheartedness, and tons of sparkly stuff.
I knew I wouldn't have the bandwidth to do that entirely in-house for a very long time, that is why I tried to bring some of these new game concepts to other studios to start working together. This means that concepts like Vampire Crawlers have been developing in the background for almost 4 years!

Vampire Crawlers has been doing everything right since its very first prototype, so it's also the one that proceeded the fastest and that will be released in 2026. The core concept at the base of the game was to be able to play a turn-based combat system at any pace, even as fast as humanly possible, and still deliver accurate results. Everything else, including using cards to represent abilities, came second! If you want to know how that idea evolved, please keep following the Vampire Crawlers page because we'll talk a lot about all of its game mechanics over the next few months. Yeah yeah, we had to put "deckbuilding" as a buzz word, because that is a major feature after all, but the game doesn't really play like a standard deckbuilder.
I hope plenty of other players will be able to try and enjoy Vampire Crawlers as much as I do!

💎 VS Engine games

We've seen what happened after the success of VS, but what about before? Well, when VS was in version 0.1 and had only 12 weapons and 7 characters, I thought it was close to completion. In fact it was supposed to have just about twice as much content in the final version. But the whole point of developing the game was for me to have fun making content, so at that time I had already started to think about what to do after finishing it and to brainstorm ideas about how to reuse the little game engine in different settings.
Mindblowing ideas eh: zombies, vikings, aliens, presidents, viruses... (look, it was 2021... )

Today, of course, it would be ridiculous and a slap to the face of the fans if poncle were to sell a new game that is just a "Vampire Survivors but with aliens", that is why VS keeps getting all sorts of new content for free and via expansions. If we are to work on a new game based on the VS engine, it has to offer a substantial difference from the original, a good reason to justify a new price tag.

What that good reason is depends on the projects we stumble upon, but a good example is Warhammer Survivors by Auroch Digital. Warhammer is a very popular IP that offers a lot of different eras and settings to explore, and Auroch Digital is a fantastic game dev studio that has proven to understand the IP and has already delivered the beautiful Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun.

👁️ New titles

Just to say that not everything we're doing revolves around VS, please know that we're also working on original titles/IPs. We've started these mostly for fun and they're just side-projects for now, quite far away, so we won't be talking about them for a long time.

⚠️ Our long-term secret project

When it comes to the poncle core dev team, everything mentioned so far was just side-projects|
The core team in fact has been busy since the start of 2025 on a long-term project, that, of course, we can't say anything about yet, not even what kind of game it is, nor if it is about VS or not :p

Vampire Survivors 1.15 coming in 2026

We're still rolling out hotfixes on all platforms for version 1.14, but in the meantime we can start having a look at what's coming in the first patch of 2026. The patch has a lot of major QOL improvements that require a rework of some core systems; that is a lot of words to say it's most likely coming in Q2 rather than at the start of the year.

🟢Arriving in 1.15
- Multiple save slots: about time eh!
- Stability Update: before adding even more new content, we need to make sure the game engine performs better on all devices
- Content management: filters and a better organization of character selection, unlock menu etc. to avoid getting lost in the large amount of content
- A content pack: an usual combination of new stage+character+weapon+darkana

🟠Unlikely to be ready for 1.15
- DLC sharing when playing online
- Cross-save on platforms that needs different policies for us (PS, Apple+)

🔴Definitely arriving post 1.15
- Platform achievements: to avoid the usual disruption, going forward we'll try to bundle all new Steam achievements in a single update at the end of the year (new in-game unlocks will work as usual). Platforms with stricter achievement policies (PS and Xbox) might still get them at the same time as the patch releases instead.

We'll be using the public-beta heavily for this next patch, so anyone who wants to try new features and content in advance, please feel free to join the beta branch and ideally the Discord too.

If you want to peer even further in the future of VS, worry not as the Chaos Roadmap is here to (not) help you:

Can we deliver all these remaining content packs in 2026? Will there be any other out-of-the-blue collabs like Balatro? When's the next lunar eclipse? Did you know the code name for Ante Chamber was "Lemon", from the Italian word "Limonare"? Are you sure you want to google it at work? Did I really mention ALL poncle projects?

Well, that's it for now. Another massive thank you to all of you for your support, hope to see you soon for 1.15 and for Vampire Crawlers!

Your professional news editor
- Luca

After years of tiny teasers, we're finally announcing VAMPIRE CRAWLERS: the turbo wildcard from VAMPIRE SURVIVORS!

As a candidate for most stupid game name of the year the minute it got announced, VAMPIRE CRAWLERS has the goal to bring many of the elements of Vampire Survivors to an existing game genre: deckbuilding. Or was it dungeon crawling? Blobber maybe? Eh.

Play cards in a turbo turn-based combat,
Explore dungeon maps to find treasures and customisations,
All dressed in a special Vampire Survivors sauce and some usual little rogue-lite elements.



VAMPIRE CRAWLERS will arrive in 2026 and is the first of our concepts for VS spin-offs that we've been making with other indie studios! It's a full game that we're nuts enough to aim to globally release on all platforms next year: please wish us luck!

We at poncle hope that you'll like VAMPIRE CRAWLERS just as much as we do: both making it and play testing it has been an absolute blast for both deckbuilding veterans and people who never played a card game before.

See you closer to the end of the year for our 2025 recap and a glance at future content for Vampire Survivors (and not only), but in the meantime please let us know what you think of VAMPIRE CRAWLERS so far and also if you have suggestions that can beat the full official title:
VAMPIRE CRAWLERS: the turbo wildcard from VAMPIRE SURVIVORS!

FAQs

- How did this project start?
Shortly after the initial success of Vampire Survivors, I was already thinking of getting in touch with other indie studios to start working on spin-offs, so that I could focus on building my team to keep working on VS, while also getting some of my game concepts for existing genres to be developed. This means that it is something that has effectively been in the works for almost 4 years! I've been calling this kind of projects "experiments" in the past Steam news.

- Is this some sort of sequel to Vampire Survivors?
This is just a spin-off of Vampire Survivors, hopefully the first of a series of spin-offs! The idea is to take some of the accidental core pillars behind the development of VS and to apply them to existing genres. I’m talking about accessibility, immediacy, affordability, replayability, lightheartedness, and tons of flashy stuff.

- Why is this a "Vampire Survivors" game and not a new IP?
VS is very well known, so I hope that this will help players understand immediately that this game has been made with the same core principles in mind, simply applied to a different game genre.
Also this helps massively getting out of the way one of the major blockers I always had when making games: defining story, settings, lore etc:

When making VS, I managed to put all of that aside and let it all come out organically while developing the game, by taking inspiration just from a weapon icon, a music track (from the usual VS composers Daniele Zandara and Filippo Vicarelli, who are back, covering each other’s music tracks for Vampire Crawlers), or even wacky theories from the community! Now all that lore has a huge value, it allows me and the other devs to just focus on the gameplay aspects of the game, while at the same time allowing space for new ideas thanks to the open-endedness of VS.

- Will you update Vampire Crawlers post-launch like Vampire Survivors?
Yes, we are already planning to keep supporting the game post-launch and we have a thousand ideas about what we could do! Vampire Crawlers is a whole game, with a beginning and an end, so we are going to wait and see what the players say and suggest before choosing what to do post-launch.

- When is it releasing?
When almost every other game is releasing: before GTA6 :)
We're aiming for early/mid 2026

- So, is this a deckbuilder dungeon crawler?
As I'm getting similar questions so I shall re-post. VC is not a deckbuild game. Could move subjectively but not a dungeon crawler game either. By incorporating with the concept of turbo(turning), it's totally brand new genre called action Turboturn™ game(Turbo Turn system).
(YES, it's just a rogue-lite deckbuilder with a touch of dungeon crawling)

- Is this a new game from Luca Galante?
Yes, hello, the game concepts for the VS spin-off are born from the same Italian-memes-ridden mind, then expertly developed, improved, and brought to life by the teams partner of poncle

1.14.105 - hotfixes

We really appreciate everyone being so patient with the team while we work on 1.14 updates, thank you from everyone here at poncle

If you have any bugs to report, please send them to support@poncle.co.uk or in our Steam Disussions bugs forum

• Fixed game crashes
  
• Fixed bad animation/collision handling on OtC giantbat
  
• Stopped DLC info title font getting too large
  
• Checked all the characters for the achievement unlock conditions
  
• Checking arcana count to make sure arcana selection screen doesn't open at the start of the game if there are no available arcana to choose (e.g if you're playing as Chaos without darkana or arcana 0 unlocked)
  
• Made DLC disks visible on unlock
  
• Stopped enemies trying to target deactivated followers (outer sabourter crash on console)
  
• Fixed Darkasso related null ref
  
• Fixed crash from Negative Space evolving twice
  
• Fixed survarots card background in pause menu
  
• Fix for overly reduced weapon slot count in local co-op
  
• Fixed missing reference to DLC selector popup
  
• Fix to stop text overflowing for online dlc title
  
• Optimisation for Magistone weapons
  
• Fixed Dance of Gold to use the correct loop.
  
• Fixed incorrect strings in Foscari adventure
  
• Fix max area cap for Inferno weapons
  
• Fix for TP_FAKE_TRIO unlock check
  
• Fixed in EN, other Tr and Ja updates
  
• Fix description for subcard + update I2L asset
  
• Removed rogue evo weapon from Pale Diamond Incursion's description
  
• Secret check for unlocking TP_ASTARTE
  
• Bestiary updates and fixes
  
• Ante Chamber Bestiary switched on
  
• Translation updates to correct Claimh solais and JiangShi
  
• OtC sprite updates
  
• Updating OtC Annette, correct sprite and portrait
  
• Removed golden finger from the list of pickups GreedyForPickups AI characters want to chase after, as they can't pick them up
  
• Fixed recently played players list
  
• Saboteur only levels up their weapon if it's enabled and they're not dead, fixes Saboteur starting to fire coins when it shouldn't during Dracula and Death cutscenes