A dark pixel-art roguelike deckbuilder. You're the mortician the night the dead stop staying dead — turn every corpse into cards, forge them to Ascended rank, and survive 21 nights, three rule-breaking bosses, and one thing that was never meant to have a name.

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Coming Soon To Early Access

The developers of this game intend to release as a work in progress, developing with the feedback of players.

Note: Games in Early Access are not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“Graveyard Shift: A Sage's Last Stand is a solo-developed roguelike deckbuilder, and games like this live or die on balance and variety. The game has been shaped by real playtesters from its very first build — Early Access is the natural next step of that process at a bigger scale. Thousands of real runs will tell us which cards are too strong, which combos nobody finds, and where the difficulty curve needs work in ways no internal testing can. We want the community's fingerprints on the final game: card balance, new enemy designs, and quality-of-life improvements will all be driven by player feedback, with honest changelogs for every update.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We plan to stay in Early Access for approximately 6 to 12 months. We would rather ship the right game than hit an arbitrary date — if community feedback tells us it needs more time, we'll take the time.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The core game is complete and fully playable today. For the full version, we plan to focus on breadth and depth: more cards, combos, and enemy types; additional elite and corrupted variants; new night modifiers; expanded meta-progression in the Morgue; and more Friends to discover beyond the Veil and leaderboards. We also plan to add more quality-of-life features and continue balance work based on player data. We plan to — never promise to — and the community will help decide which of these matter most.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Fully playable from start to finish. The Early Access version includes the complete 21-night campaign across three weeks, three bosses, 130+ collectible cards, 55 discoverable combos, a six-star rank system with Ascension beyond it, 40+ enemy types with elite and corrupted variants, the corpse intake rite, booster pack drafting, permanent meta-progression in the Morgue, a full card collection with achievements and lore, 14 night modifiers, per-night scoring with perfect-night bonuses, Steam Cloud saves. The game is stable and has been balanced through continuous public playtesting — Early Access is about growing the content and polish, not finishing core systems.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“no”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“Community feedback is already how this game gets made — every build so far has been shaped by real play testers, and Early Access widens that circle. Concretely:

• Steam Community Hub — we'll read and respond in the discussions, and run feedback threads after each update so players can weigh in on balance changes and what gets built next.
• Honest changelogs — every update ships with real patch notes: what changed, what we broke, what the community flagged, and who flagged it.
• Balance in the open — card and combo tuning will be driven by player data and discussion, not just internal testing. When a nerf or buff lands, we'll explain why.

This is a solo studio — there's no committee between you and the person building the game. If you take the time to write feedback, it gets read by the developer, every time.”
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Planned Release Date: Nov 5, 2026

This game plans to unlock in approximately 2 months

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About This Game

The Veil tore on a Monday. The dead stopped staying dead. And Aldric — Sage of the Veil, hiding from his past in a quiet mortician's job — is the only one still on shift.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT: A SAGE'S LAST STAND is a dark pixel-art roguelike deckbuilder where the dead on your table become the deck in your hands. Survive twenty-one nights of escalating horrors, forge your cards toward their final Ascended forms, and find out what's been waiting behind the Veil the whole time.

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⚰ EVERY CORPSE IS A CHOICE

Every body on your table is a build decision.

  • EMBALM — a clean card, no strings attached.

  • HARVEST — render it down for something rarer.

  • FULL RELEASE — sever the soul and rip open a booster of possibilities, worst card first, the best one always waiting at the bottom… but the Veil remembers every door you open.

Some corpses arrive possessed — confront what's inside and win, and a Legendary soul may fight beside you for the rest of the run. Lose, and it joins tonight's wave. And some souls give more than a card:

  • A rare GENEROUS SOUL spills ten cards across the table and lets you keep four.

  • A rarer GAMBLER'S SOUL deals ten face-down and dares you to flip three — and live with whatever you find.

And whatever the night hands you, the deck stays yours — any card you never asked for can be turned away at the gravedigger's price. It climbs with every refusal, so travel light while it's cheap.

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✦ SIX FAMILIES OF POWER

158 handcrafted cards. 67 named combos. One deck, built from the dead.

  • VENGEANCE — brutal, direct, and always swinging.

  • CHAOS — dice, gambits, and beautiful disasters.

  • WISDOM — patient engines that outlast the night.

  • PLAGUE — rot that does the killing for you.

  • VEIL — forbidden power at a forbidden price.

  • MYSTERY — true effects hidden until you dare to play them.

Chain the right cards and one of 67 named combos detonates across the screen — with a score multiplier that rewards style as much as survival.

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☠ LET IT ROT

Not every deck kills quickly. The best ones don't have to.

Stack Poison, Bleed and Burn on a body and it dies on its own time — then Virulence swells everything already eating the creature, and Volatile Fuel pours on what's still burning. Afflictions wear a mark on the enemy so you can always read what's killing it, and the biggest horrors in the game are the ones that give a slow build the most turns to work.

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⚔ THE DEAD FIGHT IN PACKS

Under the Blood Moon, targeting becomes the whole game.

A front-liner walks in shielded by a support line — healers stitching it back together, casters seeding poison into your hand's future. Cut the healer first, sweep the entire line with one blade, or burn the front-liner down before the mending outruns you. Cards that hit everything stop being a luxury and start being a plan.

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🌘 THE VEIL KEEPS A LEDGER

Power is never free. It isn't even cheap.

The Veil is the deep end of the pool — the widest school in the game, home to most of the Legendary companions, and the one that deals in draw, damage and control all at once. The fastest way in is Full Release: sever a soul, open its pack. But the Veil remembers every door you open — release too many souls in a row and the debt comes due mid-run, when the next thing through the tear arrives twice as strong.

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⚒ FORGE EVERY CARD TO ITS FINAL FORM

Cards aren't static — they're a ladder.

Every card climbs a six-star rank track of real, hand-authored upgrades that rewrite its numbers, its cost, and eventually its whole effect — and you can read the whole climb before you commit: right-click any card, anywhere it's offered, and it flips over in place — every rank it can reach printed on its back like a real card.

Push a Legendary companion to the top and it goes ASCENDED — a silver-electric form with an evolved signature ability:

  • Skyrend's pillars fall from the sky — unmissable, unblockable.

  • Grimm's every strike carries the rot his prey is already dying of.

  • The Wound Remembers sends a dying body's bleeding crawling into whatever rises next — landing as a blow of its own.

  • Find the rest.

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👑 TWENTY-ONE NIGHTS. THREE WARDENS. ONE SECRET.

Each week ends at a boss that rewrites the rules.

  • THE CORONER mirrors your strikes — and, enraged, starts stealing the cards out of your deck.

  • THE QUARRY KING mortars himself in fresh stone every turn, until his blows crush straight through Block.

  • THE VEIL TYRANT cannot die at all — until he unfolds, wings blotting the candlelight, and his breath turns to fire.

Over a hundred kinds of dead stand between you and the dawn, and the nights themselves turn against you: omens that reshape the rules after dark, elite waves, and things that were never meant to have names. Survive all three weeks, and the Veil finally shows you what it has been hiding.

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🌳 THE MASTERS' TREE

Beyond the Wardens wait the Masters — and permanent power.

Felling a Master earns a Mark. Marks buy medallions on a permanent talent tree: three paths of claimed-forever power, from thicker skin to the Midnight Forge, each path crowned by a capstone that changes how every future run begins. Claim the Founder's Reliquary and a Legendary of your choosing rides in your starting deck. Forever.

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📖 SIGN YOUR OWN CURSES

Deep enough down the tree, a hidden book opens.

THE LEDGER — its gold page sells permanent boons for everything you've ever banked. Its ash page is stranger: debts you sign against yourself.

  • Fight blind, with no enemy intents.

  • Let nothing heal you, all run.

  • Let your draw pile never refill — everything you play tonight is ash.

Every signed debt multiplies your score and your payout — stack the whole page and the game becomes a ×33.5 nightmare of your own design. The leaderboard remembers who signed what.

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🕯 BETWEEN THE NIGHTS

  • Upgrade the morgue itself — four tiers of permanent tools that carry across every run, the last of them sealed until you've survived all three weeks.

  • Fill the Collection — every card, all 67 combos, 18 lore notes, 30 trophies, and your highest-scoring shifts.

  • Mouse, controller, or Steam Deck — full Steam Input support swaps every on-screen prompt to your gamepad's own buttons the moment you pick it up.

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The dead are patient. Your shift starts at dusk.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Some game text, procedural artwork, sound effects, and store page copy were created with AI assistance, then reviewed and curated by the developer. Character and enemy sprites are licensed, human-made pixel art. No content is AI-generated during gameplay.

System Requirements

    Minimum:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
    • Processor: Dual-core 2.0 GHz (x64)
    • Memory: 2048 MB RAM
    • Graphics: DirectX 12 compatible GPU (GeForce GTX 650 / Radeon HD 7750 / Intel HD 620 or newer)
    • DirectX: Version 12
    • Storage: 400 MB available space
    • Additional Notes: Full controller support; plays great on Steam Deck.
    Recommended:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 11 64-bit
    • Processor: Quad-core 2.5 GHz
    • Memory: 4096 MB RAM
    • Graphics: Any modern GPU
    • DirectX: Version 12
    • Storage: 400 MB available space
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