The Vow: Vampire’s Curse makes the roguelite death loop a knight’s curse in its new demo

Most roguelites treat death as a menu screen: you fall, you return to the hub, you try again. The Vow: Vampire’s Curse, the gothic card battler from indie studio Mimyr Games, makes that return the story itself. Its hero, Sir Richard, is a knight killed at his own wedding while trying to shield his bride, Eleanor, from the vampire lord Arnaud. Then he wakes up in the church, alive and changed, and every later death sends him back to the same place. The resurrection is not a miracle. It is the curse of the title.

That premise now has a better front door. Mimyr has released an extensively reworked version of the game’s free demo on Steam, rebuilt around a new animated introduction that stages the wedding and the curse before the first card is drawn, along with a revised tutorial and a redesigned daytime phase.

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The structure is a split rhythm. Richard’s journey runs on a repeating seven-day cycle, and each day is spent in a village that will be raided once the sun goes down. In daylight, players develop and upgrade the settlement, place fences and other obstacles, and assign villagers and allies to their posts. The refreshed demo turns that preparation into a card game of its own: each village offers four buildings, and choosing which of their abilities to activate is now a hand-management decision rather than a checklist.

At night the grid takes over. Waves of vampires and their thralls close in, and the combat rewards geometry over raw damage: shoving an enemy into a hazard, pulling one onto a trap, blocking a lane with a fence or crashing two attackers into each other. Before a run starts, players assemble a deck from three themed card sets, leaning toward defence, aggression, movement or battlefield control, and chaining cards of the same colour triggers extra combo effects.

What makes the loop feel authored is what survives it. When Richard dies, story progress, knowledge and unlocked cards carry over, so each attempt peels back more of the mystery behind his return. Artefacts tilt a run in the player’s favour, while omens add curses that can turn it against them. In the announcement, the studio frames the whole thing as a story of love, death and resurrection, and the systems are built to make those three words mechanical.

The demo covers the first five days of the journey, moving between villages that each have to be readied and defended, and it includes two boss fights, against Godfrey and against Arnaud. The card upgrade system has been redesigned with new cards added, and the existing bosses have received gameplay tweaks and extra animation.

The refreshed demo is available now on Steam for Windows PC, where the full game can also be wishlisted; its store page currently lists a 2027 release, with no specific date announced. Whether Richard ever reaches the castle at the top of the mountain is a question for the full seven-day campaign. For now, the demo makes a persuasive case that dying, done right, can be a plot.

Tags: Steam, roguelikes, deckbuilding games, Mimyr Games, The Vow: Vampire's Curse

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