Hello everyone,

This update addresses a number of player-reported issues across various locations and story sequences. Many of these fixes resolve progression blockers, sequence inconsistencies, and unintended interactions discovered through your feedback.

• Fixed several event and map logic issues that could cause sequence breaks or party inconsistencies in key story areas.

• Corrected unintended interactions allowing certain key items (e.g. Dragon Stones, Strange Looking Key) to be used in battle.

• Resolved progression bugs related to the Ice Cave of Orbonne, Lurinn Castle, and Farron.

• Fixed access and sequence issues within Valice and the Dragon Cave (third trial dungeon).

• Addressed situations where returning to certain areas after story events could result in softlocks or stuck states.

• Improved general stability and consistency across multiple story triggers and transitions.

Your reports have been instrumental in helping identify these issues — thank you for taking the time to share your experiences and for your continued support.

Please continue sending feedback as we refine and polish the game further.

– Edge Geraldine Games

In our last big Toystore Update, we renamed and rebalanced all difficulties and made a change so that beating a level at Balanced difficulty (formerly Nightmare) now unlocks the next level.

This resulted in some players losing their progress if they unlocked levels prior to the Toystore Update by beating levels on the old Sanctuary difficulty.

With this patch, we corrected that issue so that now hopefully everyone has access to all levels they unlocked in the past.

We apologize to everyone affected by this issue and hope that with this update you can continue your observations undeterred!

Thank you. From everybody at White Wolf, The Chinese Room, and Paradox Interactive, we want to say a massive thank you to everybody who’s playing our game, and for the massive outpouring of support and feedback that we are receiving. We love seeing your different versions of Phyre, hearing which characters that you love to love, and love to hate. We’ve laughed at videos of you using telekinesis to drop ghouls off rooftops, or figuring out 14 different ways to kick, and we’re so grateful for every interaction.

From your comments, we also know there are some players who are facing issues. While we continue working on the post-release plans for Bloodlines 2, we’d like to address some of those immediately and provide possible workarounds so that as many of you as possible can return to enjoying the game. As part of this process, we want to thank everybody who’s taken the time to fill out the bug report form. It helps us immensely to get an overview of what issues people are facing!  

Known Issues

High Priority Items:

• The game does not launch or gets stuck on the starting screen. 

Workaround: Please try running the game and launcher as admin. 

• Seattle is not populating correctly with NPCs on some quests. 

Workaround: Please try reloading the last save from the main menu.

• The AZERTY keyboard does not work, or keybinding does not work.

Workaround: Please try adding the QWERTY keyboard layout in Windows.

We are also working on some platform-specific performance issues, such as crashes on PS5. Regarding known bugs like the Lasombra and Toreador being locked at the clan selection screen on some platforms, we recommend updating and reinstalling the game. 

While working on resolving known issues, we are also collecting your feedback continuously  for a smoother gameplay experience, and are aware of your suggestions, such as:

• There is no way to disable motion blur. 

(Workaround: Please try turning post-processing to low.)

• Settings are lacking a FOV slider

• Ability to disable HUD elements

• Facial hair in character customization

We appreciate and encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts with us. For issues related to redeeming pre-order codes, blood points, or other platform-related problems, please contact Paradox Support.

Once again, thank you for being part of this journey. Your passion, feedback, and patience mean the world to us, and we’re committed to continuing to improve Bloodlines 2. The story of Seattle’s Kindred is only just beginning. 

Hear ye, hear ye! Jester and Sock are taking their grand tour to new kingdoms! 👑✨

Starting Friday, October 24th, Once Upon a Jester will be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S! That’s right - more players can now join the improvised chaos, musical mayhem, and heartfelt hijinks that await in our silly little kingdom.

If you’ve already joined our troupe on PC or Switch, give us a wave! And if you have friends on console who need a good laugh, let them know the show’s about to begin! 🎶💫

🃏 Curtain rises October 24th - see you on stage!

This roadmap outlines the upcoming features that will lead to our next major milestone: CRETE ALPHA II, a more polished and complete version of the game. More Biomes, more weapons, more crafting systems, more combat, more depth and more polishing.

Backers will see this progress with daily or weekly updates. And good news! All your progress done in the Playtest will carry over to your copy of CRETE.

You can learn more on our website or our Discord server: https://www.cretegame.com

Patch Notes – Version 1.1

-Player agility has been doubled to provide a more authentic ninja experience.
-Some levels have been slightly darkened to enhance the atmosphere of a “mysterious and secluded military tower.”
-Light baking has been disabled, resulting in reduced memory usage and fixing issues with certain objects glowing or leaking light incorrectly.
(+Performance) Dynamic shadows are now disabled on Low graphics settings, significantly improving FPS in this mode.
(Performance) Draw calls have been reduced using GPU instancing.
(Performance) Switched from HDRP to URP, a more performance-friendly render pipeline.
(Performance) Lights and shadows have been optimized.
(Performance) Unnecessary garbage collection allocations have been resolved.
(Performance) Cloth and VFX optimizations have been made.
-Fixed a bug where enemies would block too frequently — they can no longer easily block attacks right after deflects or during fast approaches.
-Fixed an issue where enemies would move as if sliding.
-A new sword type has been added to the tutorial rooms (first two scenes).
-Fixed a camera render pass error.
-Player-thrown bombs now only kill the player at close range.
-Overly difficult levels have been rebalanced to make them easier.
-Fixed an issue where throwable weapons could pass through enemies.
-Adjusted the intro cutscene to play out over a longer duration
-Vertical attacks are now disabled for most weapons, as they were hitting too small an area and often failed to connect.
-Reduced the ragdoll movement of enemies — they now die more realistically.
-Room names have been added to the menu to make room selection easier.
-Fixed a sound bug with the boss laser attack.
-Some high-volume sounds (such as kill sounds) have been normalized.
-Fixed mesh bound issues that caused enemies and bosses to be invisible from certain angles.
-Enemies now block more effectively when in a defensive stance.
-The warning UI shown before enemies use a throwable now stays on screen slightly longer
-Stamina cost for throwing weapons has been reduced.

Hi, this is Joel, the programmer from Muriki Studio! This is my second development news post about Zombies & Bullets, and I plan to post updates more frequently to keep you informed about what’s new. Since the last post, a lot has changed in the game’s demo and we didn’t report everything, so some smaller things might not be listed here.

Also, if you played the demo months ago, try playing it again because a lot of new content has been added — your experience will be very different!

The old upgrade system used orbs collected as a sort of currency to buy upgrades in the pause menu. This made it difficult to balance the cost of upgrades and the number of orbs collected throughout the stages. Moreover, after watching many player playthroughs, we realized that upgrade purchases were often ignored, seen as more complex than they should be, or not impactful enough.

With that in mind, we’ve reimplemented the upgrade system in a way that fits into the game world, simplifies balancing, and provides a greater sense of progression.

The collected orbs now act as experience points, and the player gains levels like in an RPG. When leveling up, the player earns a skill point that can be spent to acquire an upgrade.

Upgrades can now be acquired at camps, which are campfires found in almost every stage. When sitting at a campfire, the upgrade menu appears, allowing you to spend skill points to acquire new upgrades.

The upgrades available follow the same premise as in the previous version of the game — each has a maximum level that can be improved — but the difference is that every upgrade level always costs a single skill point.

We also took the opportunity to add several new upgrades that can be acquired, including:

• Life Drain: melee strikes on enemies steal a bit of health

• Damage Reflection: when hit by melee attacks, enemies take part of the damage back

• Combo Time: the active combo lasts longer (more on this later)

• Point-blank Distance: increases the distance at which point-blank shots occur (more on this later)

• Quick Learner: increases the XP multiplier earned from enemies

• Hunter’s Luck: increases the chance for ammo and healing items to drop from defeated enemies

• Magnetism: increases the pickup range for XP and ammo (more on this later)

There are also new unique upgrades that can only be accessed through equipped backpacks, which we’ll cover next.

Taking advantage of the new camp system and greater flexibility in the upgrade system, we decided to add a collectible backpack feature, with each backpack offering a unique upgrade to the player. In the demo, there are four available backpacks:

• Simple Sack: starter backpack, allows longer dodge distance

• Dream Backpack: gives a small chance for enemies to miss attacks

• Hunter’s Backpack: increases the chance for weapons to deal critical damage

• Camping Backpack: converts healing items into XP when at full health

Additional backpacks for stages beyond the demo are already in development, along with their respective upgrades (such as increased movement speed, dealing damage to enemies passed through during a dodge, etc.).

Killing multiple enemies within a short period of time triggers a combo. Combos multiply the XP earned from enemies, encouraging you to kill as many as possible in the shortest time for more upgrade opportunities.

Shooting enemies at close range deals 50% more damage. This distance can be increased via upgrades.

With the melee strike, it’s now possible to deflect enemy ranged projectiles.

The weapon wheel is a great feature, but keyboard and mouse players suggested adding numeric shortcuts for weapons. Instead of assigning fixed shortcuts to each weapon, we decided to implement custom shortcuts directly within the weapon wheel: simply open the wheel, focus on the desired weapon, and press one of the shortcut keys (1, 2, 3, or 4 on the keyboard, D-pad on the controller). From then on, you can select that weapon directly using the shortcut, without opening the weapon wheel.

In the options menu, you can choose between holding the weapon wheel button or pressing it once to show and again to hide it.

Some keyboard and mouse players reported losing track of the mouse cursor when too much happens on screen and couldn’t tell where they were aiming. A suggested feature was a laser sight option, which is now available in the options menu (with several color choices).

Complementing the game’s cutscenes, there are now documents that can be found on corpses throughout the world, expanding the game’s story. All of them are subject to rewrites as the story continues to evolve.

• Several improvements to 3D models, textures, particle effects, etc.

• The user interface has been completely redesigned to take up less space and be less intrusive.

• Ammo and XP orbs now magnetize toward the player within a certain distance. The magnetism range can be increased via upgrade.

In the last update, we shared a few ideas we had for future implementation, one of them being a rogue-like mode. This idea was in the plans until less than a week before this post, but unfortunately, the team decided to scrap it for scope reasons.

We still plan to add a local split-screen co-op mode, which will be our next major update. It might seem simple to just split the screen, but the game wasn’t originally built with multiplayer logic in mind, so it will be a significant effort to adapt the game systems for this functionality. However, we’ve studied it, and it’s completely feasible.

At the moment, we don’t have plans for online multiplayer, but that could change depending on how popular the game becomes. Still, players will be able to play online in split-screen via Steam Remote Play Together.

Of course, we wouldn’t make a co-op mode featuring a twin brother of Captain Jacob — so we already have the new character who will join for two-player sessions: meet Sergeant Erin!

We’ve already created concept art and even an initial model of Erin. On the left is an early AI-generated concept, and on the right, a sketch made by Diego (our artist). We’ll still make visual adjustments (especially to her face), but we’re very excited to add Sergeant Erin to the roster of playable characters!

Quick note: we do not use AI-generated art in our game — all 2D and 3D art is made by our artist, Diego Almeida.

That’s it for this update report! If you’d like to suggest something to see in Zombies & Bullets (or report issues), don’t hesitate to follow our social channels, send a message on our Discord, or visit the Steam Discussion Forum.

Also, since we handle all the marketing ourselves, you can help us a lot by sharing Zombies & Bullets with your friends and influencers.

That’s all for now — see you in the next one! ːsteamhappyː

IT’S TIME! Cut That Wire is officially LIVE!!

The full launch introduces "Meat Clock", a twisted map filled with deadly, SAW-inspired contraptions, along with Dr. Pawcho - a deranged, psychopathic cat who joins the roster as a new playable character!

It's your time to #CutThatWire

All existing licenses will continue to work permanently after this change, and everyone who owns a license before the transition will be eligible for complimentary bonus content as a thank-you for your support.

You will not be required to pay anything additional.

If you’d prefer to wait, we plan to fully announce the changes during FG Con on November 8th, along with several exciting new features. Stay tuned to our keynote panel at FG Con.

You can watch the panel and other live videos from FG Con on our Twitch channel at
https://www.twitch.tv/fantasygrounds

Dear Steam Community,

Enjoy double XP and double rewards until November 5th, 2025 to celebrate Halloween!

A few pumpkins have been added, along with some lighting changes for Halloween. We’ve also returned to our original branding.

Happy Halloween! ːsteammockingː

— Chreseeba (Solo Developer)