Back in April, Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical developer Summerfall Studios launched their Kickstarter for Malys, a roguelike deckbuilder where you play as a “former priest turned demon-hunter” that certainly looked quite atmospheric. This is the same studio co-founded by Dragon Age writer David Gaider, so it’s not like they came out of nowhere. However, it fell a bit short of meeting its goal, something that quite often guarantees that death of a game. Except it just launched into early access this week. Go figure!
Let’s add a bit of context as to how that came to be, as explained by Malys project director Liam Esler in a devlog post. The team always had a plan on how to get to 1.0 for Malys, “but games like this live and die on their communities.” With the Kickstarter failing, that changed plans, leading them to need more feedback than they’d originally intended, hence the early access release.
“The community response both to the game itself and to our team has been overwhelmingly kind, and even though Malys isn’t quite where we’d ideally like it to be for a public launch, we feel bringing this current version of the game to Early Access is the best step we can take”, Esler explains.
One thing that he also made clear is that “this is very much a work in progress build of the game. Early Access on Steam in 2025 is nowadays games that are ‘mostly done’, excluding adding additional content. If you don’t want to play a version of the game that is in-progress, we don’t recommend buying this Early Access version and instead waiting for the 1.0.” A caveat was added that the price will go up after early access too, so keep that in mind depending on how much faith you have in the team.
Apparently the plan is to put out gameplay updates “about once every three weeks”, which will range from planned content, adjustments based on feedback, and bugs. In terms of what’s currently included, there’s the first region, a “segment” of story, and a “variety of cards/ curios to choose from.” A Steam post announcing the early access also lists some known bugs for you to keep in mind too.
Essentially, it sounds like Summerfall Studios are taking another big swing here after not quite managing to make contact with that Kickstarter. Good luck to them, I say, the game looks neat.
