Autumn has wrapped the world in golden mist — and with it comes a brand-new biome: 🍂 Pumpkin Grove.
A cozy, fairy-tale place where the wind whispers through the trees, candles flicker in the fog, and every path hides a little mystery.

👻 What’s New:
🌾 A new biome — Pumpkin Grove, filled with autumn warmth and a touch of gentle magic.
🎃 Plenty of new decorations: glowing pumpkin lanterns, candles, and other seasonal details that bring the festive spirit to life.
🕯️ New island inhabitants — friendly ghosts have replaced humans for the season. They wander quietly, watching from afar… and sometimes even lend a helping hand if you dare to approach.
🧩 New puzzles — themed challenges with spooky twists woven right into the environment.

🍁 Step into the soft light of lanterns, breathe in the crisp autumn air, and uncover the secrets hidden among pumpkins and shadows.

Happy Halloween — and good luck in the Pumpkin Grove! 🕯️

With love and a touch of fright, Faraway Home 🎃

• Clusters thrive or wither as you act, shaping a living ecosystem that pushes back.
  
• New Ecosystem Bar, track the world’s balance through Calm, Tense, and Crisis.
  
• Clusters now show clear states: Bountiful, Strained, Withered.
  
• Tile Impact affects yields and renewal, high stress means leaner harvests.
  
• Inscription grants permanent +1 use; combos ease the land’s burden.
  
• Hazards grow where the soil suffers, clear them to restore balance.

Hey everyone!

Friedemann here 👋

Today’s update brings some early new gameplay features to the Public Beta branch (to access: Right-click the game in Library -> Properties -> Betas -> select "beta" from dropdown) that improve balancing.

A lot of you mentioned that certain item combinations (especially the ones focussing heavily on re-spinning) can make the game a little too easy. Instead of just nerfing those items (boring), I’ve been working on new enemy actions that counter those powerful builds and make fights more dynamic and interesting.

This update introduces:

• Symbol cursing (some enemies curse one of the symbols on your wheels, disabling it for the rest of the fight -> encourages strategies with more than 3 symbols)

• Aggro meter (some enemies have an “aggro” bar that fills up with every re-spin of the wheels, triggering an interruption of the player turn when it’s full)

• Fixes for some rare cases where the game would soft lock 

• Fixed a rare issue that would corrupt & reset the save file & crash the game

• Various very minor balancing adjustments

These gameplay additions are meant to keep things interesting, still allowing respin combos to be quite powerful, but not completely OP.

Once you’ve had a chance to try it, please share your feedback here or in the discussions, it’s been super valuable so far and I’m reading everything. Would love to hear what you think! <3

Cheers,
Friedemann

• Fixed a bug where the Core Express button would not deactivate after sending resources and crash the game when pressed.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented new floors from being built in single-floor saves.
  
• Swiftbase building now affects buildings at the top, bottom left and right.

I know we’ve already looked at the enemies in 🎃Haunted Hollow🎃, but seeing as today is Halloween, I figured we should definitely take another look at this domain. There are some spoilers in here, so if you're trying to go into the game blind you'll want to pass on this one.

I’ve covered a bit about this domain’s Guardian and quest in the past, but I wanted to dig in a bit more about how this all works. But first, meet Alex, the domain’s Guardian:

Alex is seemingly the only Guardian that hasn’t lost control of his domain. He still has his scepter and has not been transformed. But that doesn’t mean your job is done because Alex asks you to do something for him before he’ll help you recall your core memory of Haunted Hollow. Specifically, you’ll need to bring Alex game cartridges for his Super Dreamstation 32 video game console. These are some retro games that his dad really likes, so he's curious to try them out.

By the time you reach Alex, you may have already encountered one or more of these cartridges out in your travels because they are located throughout Slumberland. Once you’ve met Alex, you’ll be able to carry these back to him, but it’s a bit trickier than you might think. When you’re holding something in your hands, you’re unable to do things like dangle from monkey bars, use your pogo stick, or attack enemies with your yo-yo. Making it back to Alex from wherever you find these is a bit of an adventure unto itself for each one and will require some deliberate pathfinding on your part.

So rather than battling a boss here, you’ll instead have a long-running quest. You could go ahead and try to get started on it right away (Alex will point you towards the one cartridge location he knows of from the start) or just keep track of cartridges as you find them. They’ll be marked on your map once you spot them, so you can always come back to grab them later. I hope this is a nice change of pace from a boss fight, and that you’ll explore Haunted Hollow for ideal routes back to Alex while carrying a cartridge.
 

Once you’ve brought Alex enough cartridges such that he helps you push back the Oblivion, he’ll also offer to sell you some new pajamas, the Ghoulish PJs 💀. With these spooky PJs, you’ll fit right in at Haunted Hollow. Here’s a quick look at how they work currently:

And the in-game description:

These PJs were once worn by a lucid dreamer and allow you to ride the line between being awake and asleep.

Buff - Unawake
You do not suffer any damage from enemies, but hazards always wake you up in a single hit.

I made these pretty strong for the first pass, and the reaction was about as expected (playtesters that got these PJs usually responded with something along the lines of “wow, these seem busted!”). So from here I think I do need to tone these down to bring them more in line with other PJs. While I think the one-hit wake-up from hazards is very punishing (maybe more so than players realize at first), I don’t want these to even feel broken. While it’s fun to abuse mechanics and for players to try to “break” the game, if you have one set of PJs that players think is way better than the others, it just removes the decision about which PJs to wear, and the goal is for the players “load out” (PJs and Little Buddy) to always be something they should be considering. So we need a fair balance of pros and cons with this ability.

And here's some changes I’m thinking of making to this:

• You'll still actually get hit by enemies (and thus knockback and hit-stun), you just won't receive any damage from those hits.

• Projectiles get treated as hazards and can also one-shot you.

I’ll test these approaches out and maybe it just needs one or the other, or maybe it needs both. We’ll see how it goes in the next round of playtesting!
 

The last thing I’ll dig into here that’s kind of cool about Haunted Hollow is how the lighting in the game works, because there are a lot of dark areas in Haunted Hollow. If it gets completely dark, you won’t see anything except outlines of your character and enemies.

This of course makes it very difficult to navigate, so you’re gonna want some light. There are sometimes lanterns strewn about to help you see, and there’s even some enemies that emit light, though you’ll have to avoid destroying them if you want them to keep lighting everything up for you.

But probably what you’ll need to do most of the time is carry a jack-o-lantern around with you. These are a great source of light and allow you to see to navigate through the dark areas, but as we mentioned above with the cartridges, not having your hands free can be a problem. And besides, what if you’re trying to carry a video game cartridge through Haunted Hollow to Alex? In that case you’d definitely benefit from having a Little Buddy that can help you see in the dark, so make sure to explore Slumberland and keep an eye out for clues!

So what do you think of Haunted Hollow? Did you enjoy this domain-specific overview? Please let me know in the comments below! As a big fan of all things Halloween, I always knew from the get-go that Little Nemo was gonna have to include a Halloween-themed dream domain so it's fun to get to show it off a bit ahead of release. 🎃

• Added Scroll of Summon Greater Demon to the randomized treasure

• Options button to return to game relabeled as it was slightly confusing

• Fixed a bug where you couldn't cast polymorph on summoned monsters (although I haven't found a use case for this yet.)

• Fixed a bug where summoned creatures turn counters didn't update on loading a saved game

Happy Halloween everyone!

Added - Mission Control Terminal. You can find it right outside the landing area

Changed - Distance grab is now smoother, avoiding all sorts of issues

Fixed - Normal shelf is no longer causing havoc when bought

Fixed - Furniture disappearing on drop should no longer happen. If it does, please let me know! Restarting the game will fix it

Fixed - Mushroom land unlock item no longer distorted

Known bug - Free items don’t get tested once they’re bought. Technically, if you don’t restart the game, you could get infinite checkouts and normal shelves. These items are crucial, so the idea is that they’re free if they don’t exist, but after that, they cost credits.

It allows you to upgrade your landing area. Unlock up to 9 landing pads in total — let the customer mayhem begin!

Customers who are not served will hang out around shelves. It’s best to keep them entertained and have enough shelves.

Highlights around the various shelves show you which slots customers will walk toward. Make sure they can reach them.

Hello, cleaners!

Today IGN have revealed an exclusive peek behind the curtain with some super-early (it’s so early, seriously, nobody should be looking at this) gameplay footage, showing off some of the features that we’ve been working on (and some photos of our pets).

We’d like to stress quite how early this is. Super early. Any reasonable game developer wouldn’t be showing you this, but those people are boring and we want you to have this insider look. Over the years we’ve always found that honest, open communication is better for everyone. Generally speaking, you probably shouldn’t take what we say too seriously.

There’s so much more in the pipe that we can’t wait to show you. More levels, tools, Kaiju, unreasonable bugs and out-of-the-box ways to meet your own death.

Don’t forget to join us on Discord if you’d like to complain about the playtest not being live yet politely ask about when the playtest will go live.

Until Next Time,

- Brightrock Games & Mythwright

Boo! It's a word we've been hearing a lot these past months, but it's also the sound of Halloween. And since it IS Halloween today, we'd like to wish you, to put it BLUNTly, a dope evening with your favorite, uhhh, candy.

Good news: we haven't forgotten about the owners of the legendary PlayStation 4, and next week we'll have a surprise for you.

More good news: we're finishing the controller update for DDS1 on PC. It's taken a while, but we faced some unexpected problems, which, for example, caused the sky to flicker since we had to update the engine version. It took a bit of time to straighten it out, but ultimately it should be a good update.

We'll also have a status update on DDS3 from the producers. I saw the prototype with my own eyes, the mixing, the city, the pew-pew, the driving. Still early in development in the grand scheme of things, but definitely in the project, working, and very promising.

Stay frosty, and don't overdose on the pumpkin spice!

• This update includes an upgrade to the game engine version to improve overall security. The updated engine addresses recently identified software vulnerabilities, keeping the game environment safe and reliable.