If you’ve ever wished you could grow turnips in the morning and get chased by something with too many teeth in the afternoon, well, you’ve got a weird taste, my friend. Be that as it may, one upcoming title on Steam is built to make your quirky wish come true.
With a solid helping of inspiration from Stardew Valley, one of the coziest farming/life sims you could play right now, as well as Valheim, one of the most beloved survival games around, this could be the perfect mix. And right now, you can download a free demo to see what all the fuss is about before it hits Early Access on September 22.
The pitch for Sagestone Games’ Delverium is pretty simple to say out loud, even if it’s a lot to actually build: farming, settlement building, crafting, and exploration mixed with survival and dungeon crawling, all wrapped around a mystery you’re supposed to piece together as you go. Sagestone is leaning hard into that mix of cozy and dangerous.
You’ll till soil, plant seeds, water crops, and raise animals just like you would in Stardew Valley. Then you’ll wander off into caves and dungeons, mine for ore, and fight whatever’s waiting down there, which what Valheim asks of you. The world in Delverium is procedurally generated, so no two playthroughs are laid out quite the same way, and there’s a good deal of it to dig through: exotic biomes, hidden caves, and dungeons scattered across the map.
The story hook is something called the Faults, a mysterious force invading and destabilizing the land that you’re meant to investigate and eventually put a stop to. There’s also lore to uncover throughout the world, so if you like piecing together a plot from fragments rather than being told everything upfront, that’s on the menu too.
Building and crafting get a decent amount of attention as well. You can put up shelters, unlock recipes for food, tools, weapons, armor, and building materials, and recruit NPCs who’ll trade with you once you’ve got a base going in Delverium. The developers have also thrown in some quality-of-life touches, like nested crafting and an expandable player inventory, so hopefully it avoids some of the tedium that survival games can fall into.
Where it really opens up is with other people. Delverium supports up to eight players online, plus local split-screen for up to four, so this could be the kind of game you and a few friends dump a weekend into. Whether you want to spend that weekend building a cozy farm together or diving headfirst into the scariest cave you can find is entirely up to you.
The demo is up right now on Steam if you want to get a feel for the farming, crafting, and exploring before committing to anything. The full Early Access release lands on September 22. The developers say they plan to keep expanding it with additional biomes, boss fights, gear, quests, fishing, NPC options, and other new content during Early Access, which they expect could last up to two years.
While the demo is free, Delverium isn’t planned to be a free game. Its price is currently unannounced, and the base price will gradually increase during Early Access as content and features are added, with a possible additional increase at the 1.0 launch.
If you’ve been waiting for something to fill the gap between your favorite cozy games and survival picks, there’s no good reason not to give the Delverium demo a try and decide whether it deserves a spot on your wishlist.
- Brand
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Valve
- Original Release Date
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September 12, 2003