One of our most anticipated games of 2026, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors, is getting its first playable demo during Steam Next Fest on February 23. The demo will also be available on Xbox and progress will carry over to the full game. Although the demo is currently scheduled to launch only on Xbox and PC, the full game is heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, PC, and eventually mobile.
Vampire Crawlers was a surprise debut in November 2025 during an Xbox Partner Preview event. It’s a new game from developer Poncle, the minds behind the highly addictive and successful Vampire Survivors. Vampire Crawlers is a dungeon crawler with deckbuilding and a card customization mechanic. While its full release date hasn’t been decided yet, it looks like Poncle is ready to share more about how the game works ahead of the demo’s release.
The first episode explores Turboturn, which Poncle says is the game’s simplest mechanic, and card customization, which may be Vampire Crawlers’ deepest mechanic. Turboturn is essentially turn-based combat without the wait. Players won’t have to pause for animations to complete before triggering their next move. That means the game stacks and executes ability inputs based on the player’s pace. As for card customization, Gems let players customize their cards with a variety of effects. These range from simple damage multipliers to Weapon Evolutions to complex logic twists.
The good news is we only have a month to wait before we can get our hands on the demo. Based on Vampire Survivors, though, I expect Vampire Crawlers to be an excellent follow-up.
