The Necromancer’s Tale runs great on the Steam Deck, and we’ve been doing a lot of our current playtesting on it.

Graphics
The game runs at 60fps on full graphics settings on the native Deck resolution. Text size is configurable.

Controls
The schematic below shows the game controls for the Steam Deck. You can play the game entirely using the two joysticks and buttons.

The joysticks move your character and virtual mouse pointer. During normal play the D-Pad is used for cycling through nearby hotspots (and you can use A to interact with one and automatically walk up to it). During conversation, the D-Pad cycles through your chat choices. The triggers and bumpers do a variety of camera controls and other in-game things that you would normally do with the mouse buttons/wheel.

Virtual Mouse
The right stick controls the mouse pointer, and settings include top-speed and acceleration. We have found this to be a very good replacement for mouse/touchscreen. In general, ‘A’ is equivalent to clicking the left mouse button, and ‘B’ is equivalent to pressing Escape.

The virtual mouse is used, and works very well, during inventory management and combat, which are the most complex parts of the game in terms of mouse control.

Keyboard
An onscreen keyboard appears when you need to enter text (which is rare- it’s generally just at the start when naming your character, or when renaming a save file). You can use the virtual mouse (or of course the touchscreen) to type.

Steam Cloud
The game saves to Steam Cloud so you can move seamlessly between Deck and PC play.

Touchscreen
The Deck's touchscreen works just fine, of course, if you wish to use it, but the game plays perfectly without it.

XBox Controller
The game runs equally well on PC using an XBox controller. Here too you can comfortably play without need for keyboard or mouse.

Fans and supporters, we are resetting the game release date and this announcement contains a full status update including the rationale for the new date. A huge thank you to the team who have at this point implemented over 350,000 words in the game narrative, over 180 unique NPCs, a robust combat system, and an incredible city and environs.

The bulk of game content is now in place, and has been heavily tested from a bugs point of view, but we need some more time to do playthrough testing, balancing, and content tweaks. Please continue to report bugs in the demo, in particular the specific places where you find you can run through walls - this has been an ongoing challenge since we implemented and continue to improve free-movement with WASD/joystick control. We would like to say a huge thank-you to our supporters who continue to help us improve overall quality.

We want to ensure we release the game to our highest achievable standard and trust therefore that your patience will continue as we endeavour to bring you the best experience we can.

We have implemented over 350,000 words in the game narrative, with about 25,000 words left to write. Books, lore, and journal notes are complete and add about 25,000 more, bringing the game to around 400,000 in total. This has been a huge undertaking over the last 4 years, involving a writing team of 8 part-time writers/editors.

Over 180 unique NPCs are now in the game, playing major and minor roles in the game plots, as well as many having their own sidequests. Almost all have partial voice-acting, from our 25 voice actors.

The combat system is core-complete, having undergone some major revisions in the last 2 years. A few battle-magic spells and crafted battle-potions remain to implement- these generally require knowledge that you pick up while exploring dungeons, forests and ruins.

The over-world is complete, including the city and its environs (forests, cemeteries, canyons). Building interiors are complete, as are most of the underground and arcane areas (caves, crypts, catacombs, realms of the dead)- some small underground regions remain to complete.


End-2024: Core content complete - main quests and sidequests.
Feb 2025 Controllers & Steam Deck finalising & certifying.
March 2025: Completion of voice and ambient sound.
April 2025: Completion of additional narrative and open-world side content.
May 2025: Completion of Battle-magic and Potions.

Balancing (trust and tension systems, skillchecks, combats) to run Feb-May 2025.
Coverage playtests to run Feb-April 2025.

May 2025: Release-Announcement Trailer
May 2025: New Demo (with unseen content)
June 2025: Steam NextFest
Late June/early July 2025: Game Release.