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Shueisha Games e lo sviluppatore poncle hanno annunciato Jujutsu Kaisen Rumble: Survivaton, un nuovo survival multiplayer ambientato nel mondo di Jujutsu Kaisen di Gege Akutami, che sarà disponibile su PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2 e PC (Steam) nel 2026.
poncle ha annunciato il contenuto scaricabile per Vampire Survivors "Legacy of the Bloodmoon", che verrà pubblicato quest'Estate.
Vampire Survivors DLC ‘Legacy of the Bloodmoon’ announced alongside ‘Survivaton’ label - Gematsu
poncle has announced Vampire Survivors downloadable content “Legacy of the Bloodmoon.” It will launch this summer.
The studio also announced “Survivaton,” a new label for its growing lineup of Survivors-based projects, released a free content update for Vampire Survivors, and officially announced the new Japan studio led by Sawaki Takeyasu first revealed in a Weekly Famitsu interview earlier this week.
Vampire Survivors will be renamed Vampire Survivors: First Surivaton as part of the new label’s launch, and a Switch 2 version is currently in production.
Here are the details:
“Survivaton” and Vampire Survivors: First Survivaton
“Survivaton” is the name of poncle’s new lineup of Survivors-like projects. Short for “survive a ton,” the label encompasses internally developed games that build on the foundation of the studio’s flagship title, Vampire Survivors, in collaboration with selected content partners. Each project will aim to introduce major gameplay changes, content expansions, or genre twists exploring ideas substantial enough to stand as their own games. The “Survivaton” initiative will serve as poncle’s umbrella for future survivors-like releases, and reflecting its place as the foundation of the series, Vampire Survivors will also be renamed to Vampire Survivors: First Survivaton. To celebrate this new chapter, the game is releasing its free Patch 1.15 update on Steam today, featuring a new stage, new characters, new weapons, and new Darkanas. Patch 1.15 will be released on all other platforms a bit later, by the end of the month, due to platform-specific optimizations and differences in save slots management. On the bright side, we will also be releasing a Nintendo Switch 2 version, with better performance and mouse support! Players looking for more information on the series can visit poncleup.com.
Vampire Survivors Expansion Pack “Legacy of the Bloodmoon”
Off the heels of its name change, Vampire Survivors: First Survivaton will also be getting a long-awaited expansion pack, “Legacy of the Bloodmoon.” The “evil twin” to the game’s first-ever expansion pack “Legacy of the Moonspell” and expected this summer across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and mobile platforms, “Legacy of the Bloodmoon” will include a substantial 10 new characters, more than 16 weapons and evolutions, a new XL stage, and eight new music tracks. As part of this release, poncle will expand “Legacy of the Moonspell” with additional content and permanently reduce its price, ensuring both it and Legacy of the Bloodmoon deliver a similarly substantial experience.
poncle Japan
To further support its growing global ambitions, poncle is establishing poncle Japan, a dedicated Japanese subsidiary focused on deepening the studio’s presence in one of the world’s most important gaming markets. Headed by Sawaki Takeyasu, poncle Japan will oversee local development initiatives and strategic partnerships across the region. The team will serve as a bridge between poncle’s global operations and Japanese players, creators, and industry partners, ensuring the studio’s games and initiatives resonate with local audiences while helping identify new opportunities for growth and collaboration.
Vampire Survivors: First Survivaton is available now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, iOS, and Android.
Watch a new set of trailers below.
DLC “Legacy of the Bloodmoon” Announce Trailer
Version 1.15 Update “The Lycaeum” Launch Trailer
Vampire Crawlers: a sequel seeking to shift perspective
By Neil Merrett Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors, released on Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026, developed by Poncle Three years after the original Vampire Survivors built a uniquely intense 2D demon slaying experience, a sequel seemingly shifting to 3D seeks to take a very different approach to game design The release and success of Super Mario 64 in the mid-1990s seemed to…
A Review of Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors for Switch 2!
I had the privilege of playing the OG Vampire Survivors (VS) back when it was released as an Early Access game on Steam back in December 2021. Admittedly I initially viewed the touted “reverse” bullet-hell game with some skepticism thinking it a cheap Castlevania knockoff using premade assets. I soon ate my proverbial hat, sinking hours upon hours into the game, grinding away, unlocking the game’s multitude of power ups and characters, trying to collect every relic, tick off every secret, purchasing every expansion, and playing it across every console available (including iPhone), I had become a Vampire Survivors evangelist. I became addicted to its accessible gameplay, retro charm and its winking reference to Italian culture. FULL DISCLOSURE: I was born and grew up in Italy, where I still currently live part of the year, and yes, I am fluent in the Italian language. I realised that a lot of the game’s characters and item names were Italian puns, such as the appropriately named revival dessert, “Tiragisu” (Pick me up), feathery companion “Peachone” (pigeon) or the desiccated skeletal character “Mortaccio” (slang for a curse phrase, “your wretched dead ancestors”). I soon discovered that the designer Luca Galante is in fact Italian, making the game while he was living and working in London, UK (where I also happened to live for a few years).
Being a roguelike & deckbuilder fan (of both Hades, and Slay the Spire) imagine my amazement and excitement when Poncle announced a card building variant, Vampire Crawlers! Now a turn-based dungeon explorer, you explore a 3D environment in a first person perspective defeating waves of familiar bat sprites, Skelingtons, bulls, lizardmen et al and watch dozens of gems spill out filling your XP meter granting you choices of card/item cards straight from the original game. If you’re a fan of the previous game, you’ll be very familiar with the collection of weapons and items as they are pretty much the same as the first one, even the weapon evolution combinations are the same, Garlic + Pummarola = Soul Eater, yum yum! One of the funnest elements in the original game was collecting game breaking combinations of items and weapon evolutions and watching those synergies just evaporate enemies into dust via a flood of kaleidoscopic lights and particles; the screen strobing and shaking at the risk of giving me a seizure; my hardware slowing to a chug (particularly on a mac or Nintendo Switch). This has been somewhat replicated via Vampire Crawlers’ combo system. Like Magic or Hearthstone, each card has a mana cost. Basic attacks or items have “0” Cost, such as knives or whips. Stronger items and evolved weapons will have higher costs and so on. The ingenious mechanic creates a combo whenever you use cards in sequential order eg, you play a 0 Cost card, then a 1 Cost card this will increase the power of your 1 Cost card and increase your combo counter. So if you increase the power of Spell Book you will get more mana and therefore be able to play more powerful cards. Coupling in draw cards for increased cards, wild cards to continue your combo you can potentially have endless streaks. This mechanic adds a more strategic element to the game vs the original Vampire Survivors as each turn you may have to carefully consider the order in which you play your cards. This can make the difference in surviving an intense boss fight. A minor nitpick is that making the game more strategic unfortunately has the downside of making the game slower to play as opposed to its progenitor. The original VS game mercifully limited runs to 30 minutes or less, which was perfect when I wanted to squeeze in a digital quickie when I last worked in an office (my being let go had nothing to do with slaying monsters while on the job, I swear!). Crawlers’ runs, however, take an average of about 60-90 minutes to complete, this can result in frustration when you’re on the last level of a dungeon and die at the hands of the final Boss creature. This in turn makes grinding gold to unlock new crawlers and power ups more gruelling. Overall I’m really enjoying this evolution of the original game’s formula! So far I’ve put in 15 hours and still have to complete the final tower in the game. I have yet to see what the endgame and secrets involve. Vampire Crawlers has been a success in translating the realtime action into a card slayer, and highly recommend it if you were a fan of the original and/or like deck builder games. I cannot wait to see the expansions for this down the line, hopefully with Castlevania and Balatro crossovers! Just like in Vampire Survivors!
Some Thoughts About... Vampire Crawlers
“Deck-building rogue-like” is highly ranked among my least favorite game types, but I did enjoy Vampire Survivors, so let’s give it a shot. Surprisingly, the dungeon crawling is the worst aspect of Vampire Crawlers since it slows everything down. The stages are too long. From the second stage on, they’re five floors deep without much ramp up. When you’re playing “right”, your hands can take several minutes to resolve for boss fights, so they drag on. I regularly spend about 50-70% of my Switch’s battery on a single stage (in airplane mode and the screen at under 50% brightness). If you want to make the final stage that long, sure, but build up to that. The first difficulty of stages could have been 2 floors, the next 3, the final 4, and then the last two stages your 5 and 6s.
Crawlers doesn’t seem like it would be as enjoyable for people that haven’t played Vampire Survivors, but also because it’s a sequel, it doesn’t have that sense of discovery the first game had. It’s all the same items and all the same characters and all the same locations and all the same enemies. And for people that are really into deckbuilding games, it’s probably too simplistic to remain interesting outside of the meta progression. Like, it’s so simplistic that it almost doesn’t matter what your attack cards do. The combat system is built around building combos from what the card costs so what really matters is how much a card costs, not what attack it performs. Once you figure that out, you stop really looking at the cards and just look at costs. What’s the difference between the ice wand and the fire wand? The ice one costs 0 and the fire one costs 1. There are no other considerations beyond that cost value. In VS, attacks fired at different rates, for different durations, in different patterns, on different timers, and at different speeds. Here, you don’t have to think about any of that.
It’s considerably smaller in scale too. There are fewer characters and items. Most stages get repeated three times and there are fewer locations. The stages are even less interactive than in VS. The Milk Factory has the mine carts, but you can’t use them in combat. They’re just candlesticks with different animations. The enemy spawning sigils are on the floor of Gallo Tower, but they’re just decorations and don’t do anything when you step on them.
I’d hesitate to even call this a “sequel”. It’s more… a reimagining of VS in a different genre.
Just like with Vampire Survivors, the game will crash on you. BUT! This time, it actually saves mid-run. So, that’s some kind of improvement. It always crashed on me after beating the final boss of a dungeon or when stepping into a dungeon’s exit so there every crash was a horrible “oh gods I don’t want to have to do that again” build up to a sigh of relief seeing I just needed to re-collect the final treasure chest and exit.
Man, there are some bad loading times. Over 15 seconds to load a stage and frequently again to move from one floor to the next. I played the demo on PC and don’t remember that, so maybe it’s yet another problem they have making games for the Switch or something happened going from demo to full release.
I would still recommend a handheld for the game. It’s the kind of game to play on a treadmill or safely wandering and having your attention elsewhere. Plus, it just plays better with a controller. I didn’t like just mouse/touchscreen, or mouse and keyboard in the demo.
The UI is a cluttered mess both on the map and in battle. Important information gets covered up because multiple elements overlap yet there are spaces where the screen is empty so everything could have been spread out, there’s a lot of junk on screen, and it uses the same lousy menus as VS.
You can’t auto-sort your hand in any way. You can manually drag cards around, but it’s really slow once you have a big hand and it glitches out frequently and moves multiple cards at the same time if you try to loop around from the left side of your hand. The whole battle mechanic is built around combos based on the cards’ costs but then they don’t even let you sort by cost. I was pulling hundreds of cards for my hand and each card was barely enough pixels to see the cost. You stop playing strategically at some point and just throw things down.
There’s an “auto-play” button, but it’s not good. It doesn’t play well strategically, so it stops being useful beyond the first few stages.
The art seems to be straight ripped from VS, which was itself a shameless rip of Castlevania, so that still looks good. And the soundtrack is full of bangers. They do a fun thing where the audio is muted when you’re moving around the stage and it only kicks in at normal volume once you enter combat.
The voices are annoying. The announcer is funny, but the characters don’t add anything.
The game rather unfairly changes how combat against bosses works towards the end. I spent most of the game having fun with decks that did a little damage each card but led to long strings of cards so I could play very long hands. After the switch, bosses do massive damage based on the number of cards you play, so you’re punished for my style of play and pushed towards doing a lot of damage in as few cards as possible. That style of play isn’t as fun or rewarding and leads to very few gems being viable. I beat the last stage with a not good build dependent on pulling a specific card that could kill anything in the game in two hits. The game really just gets kind of boring once you’ve figured out the few strategies that work in the late game, because every battle is just you executing the same play order each time. There may be more viable strategies, but the game really pushes you to either build a single card that does ludicrous damage or to abuse the freeze ability. It’s just those two things over and over for every boss fight.
Vampire Crawlers is… fine. It’s a perfectly fine follow-up/sophomore project for a company, but not something I’ll likely devote as much time or attention to as I did with Survivors.
I’m keen with the rampant asset re-use, but I was imagining that the stages would have more to do in them, the game would progress differently, different characters would appear, dungeons would have unique gimmicks, and different enemies would have unique attacks or do something special. When push comes to shove, there are really only two enemies in the game, just reskinned in dozens of ways. Enemies that attack when your turn ends and then bosses that attack after you play a certain number of cards. A few bosses have gimmicks like Confusion, which randomizes the cost of cards, or can freeze a card to make it cost more, but that’s about it. It’s a short game but runs out of fun things to do before you even hit the end.
Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors releases today digitally for the PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Steam and Microsoft Store.