Draftula, a puzzle game in which you stack rooms into a vampire’s castle the way you would drop pieces in a falling-block game, started life as a quick entry to the GMTK Game Jam 2025 and now has a free Steam demo, two showcase trailers in October and a new spooky-season mode. What it does not have yet is a release date or a price: Steam still lists the full game as “To be announced”.
From jam entry to Steam page
The game is credited on Steam to Team Draftula, which also publishes it. Its original jam build, posted on itch.io by a developer who goes by joespacio, is still playable in a browser, and the page lays out how the project grew:
- 2025: Draftula is submitted to the GMTK Game Jam 2025, built in the Godot engine.
- October 31, 2025: a Halloween update and a web build go up on itch.io.
- May 12, 2026: the developer announces Draftula is coming to Steam.
- July 27, 2026: the free Steam demo launches; it now holds a Positive rating from 25 reviews.
- October 6, 2026: a demo update adds a new mode for the spooky months, the same week a new gameplay trailer runs in the Out of Bounds Showcase.
- October 12, 2026: Draftula appears among more than 50 games in the first Cozy After Dark Showcase, the trailer that has been circulating this week.
How it plays
Each night you drop rooms onto a board and try to build as high as you can before a hero arrives to bring it all down. Rooms grant bonuses when they sit beside the right neighbors, so the puzzle is less about clearing lines and more about learning which rooms get along. Between runs, you spend gems on new rooms and talk to people in the nearby town, who slowly explain the Count and why you are building for him at all.
The store page promises more than 50 rooms, three maps with their own rules, and short runs. The demo covers part of the first of four zones. The minimum PC spec is light: Windows 10, a 2GHz dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 1GB of video memory, which puts it within reach of older laptops. English is the only language listed.
Where it fits
Cozy After Dark, presented by the nonprofit Dames 4 Games with puzzle publisher Draknek & Friends and Toronto agency Continue, was built around games that mix comfort with something creepy. Draftula fits that brief more literally than most: no combat, a cartoon Count, and a hero as the threat. It shared the bill with Tom the Postgirl, which Badiyaa covered this week, but unlike that game it has no launch date yet.
Players of the jam build have already tested how far the stacking can go. One commenter on itch.io reported building for about four hours, estimated a castle height of at least 1,500 and named it “The Tower of Babula”. The developer replied that it was the tallest castle they had seen. Others asked for a way to turn off screen shake, and one noted that the room choices can feel limited when the draw hands you only small rooms, which are the kinds of rough edges a jam game carries into a commercial version.
What to watch
For now the decision for curious players is simple: the demo is free and small. The open questions are the ones the Steam page leaves blank, the date, the price and whether consoles follow. The next fixed point is the demo itself, which Team Draftula last updated on October 6 and which remains the only way to play the Steam version until a release date is set.
Image: Todor Bozhinov, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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