One of the Year’s Best Games Is Officially Out on Phones. God Help Us All

Oct 12, 2026 - 19:06

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One of the Year’s Best Games Is Officially Out on Phones. God Help Us All

Published Oct 12, 2026, 11:11 AM EDT

Giovanni Colantonio is a video game journalist who has covered the industry for two decades. He was formerly a senior editor at Digital Trends and has contributed to publications like Inverse, Fanbyte, and Hard Drive. His specialty is criticism, as he’s focused on a modern approach to video game reviews that’s focused on the nuances of how interactivity communicates to players. He is currently a member of the New York Video Game Critics Circle.

Your phone now belongs to Poncle

A vampire holds a wine glass in Vampire Crawlers key art.

As 2026 gets into its home stretch, I’ve found myself reflecting on all the games I’ve enjoyed so far this year. One game in particular has held up as a genuine best-of-the-year, despite releasing in April and summarily getting followed by a months-long stretch of instant classics. Yes, I’m talking about Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard From Vampire Survivors.

I know that for sure thanks to Vampire Crawlers’ new mobile port, which brings the deckbuilding roguelike to iPhone and iPad today. It turns out that Poncle’s Vampire Survivors spinoff still very much has me enthralled, which is a problem now that I have it in my pocket at all times.

Vampire Crawlers takes the fundamental ideas of Vampire Survivors and remixes them into a very different kind of game. It’s a deckbuilding dungeon crawler where you try to put together a synergistic collection of attacks, stat boosts, and defensive maneuvers, and use them to wipe out waves of monsters in turn-based battles. The trick is that cards become more powerful if you play them in ascending order of cost. You need to play the hand you’re dealt carefully each time to hit an order of operations that maximizes damage.

I didn’t fully understand the nuances of that system when I started playing it back in April. I felt like I didn’t have a lot of options when it came to playing cards, as I’d always want to count up in cost from 0. It took me a while to understand how to build a deck around creating longer, more consistent runs. Soon enough, I learned how to draft new cards to keep my odds of achieving an unbroken run up. I began modifying the cost of cards, both making some intentionally more expensive and others into negative cost cards that actually gave me mana back, in order to extend combos even further. Once I cracked how to reverse a run to count down instead of up, I found myself making big-brain plays that had me doing 10x combos consistently. There is way more depth to Crawlers than is first apparent, which makes starting from scratch on a new platform appealing.

A player battles ghosts in Vampire Survivors.

When I first played Vampire Survivors in April, my immediate reaction was that I needed a mobile version of it. Both Vampire Survivors and Balatro arguably reached their full potential on mobile platforms, and Crawlers felt like an obvious port given that it's an unholy merger of the two. Surprisingly, the team at Poncle didn’t entirely see that reaction coming initially. In speaking with producer Tommaso Verde in a video interview ahead of the launch, Verde told Polygon that the feedback from fans has started to change the way Poncle is thinking about mobile as a platform.

“We hadn’t realized how much players would want a mobile version,” Verde said. “We thought all of the people would be playing on PC, console, or maybe on Steam Deck. The overwhelming feedback on this really made us think maybe we should keep our eyes more open on the mobile versions of the games overall. I think it’s something we are keeping in mind overall, but currently I don’t think I can say it has changed a proper strategy at this point. But definitely thinking about it more and more.”

You can kind of tell that the request took Poncle by surprise, because the mobile version of Vampire Crawlers isn’t quite perfect on mobile just yet. It’s very much the Windows PC version dropped onto a smaller screen, with the main play area contained to a central box. There are still direction arrows that you can use to navigate, though they’re a bit too small. Luckily, swipe gestures work for moving, which is a more natural solution. I’m hoping that we get a tweak down the road to make the action full-screen, because it all feels a little too cramped at the moment.

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Though it’s better suited for iPads, I’m still finding myself captivated by Crawlers all over again on iPhone. In fact, after writing the sentence you just read, I popped the game back open to check one quick thing. That turned into me getting obsessive over a good run and unlocking a boatload of new upgrades that almost tempted me to do one more before remembering I had to finish writing this. Oops.

For the record, Poncle knows that its games have a way of eating players’ time unexpectedly. Verde says its something he knows all too well, because the team itself gets lost in its own games when developing them sometimes.

“We do hope that players do get lost…. Or do not?” Verde said. “Because I want safety for players! I don’t want them to be stuck on their phone playing Crawlers all the time! So we always say ‘...I’m sorry? Probably?’”