The playtest is open — where we are

We made it: the Ultima Cenere Playtest is open. You request access from the game's Steam page, I let testers in in waves, and from there you download it and play. Not a video, not a demo on rails: the game, the real one, with all its wonders and all its rough edges.

Since this is the first time people I've never met can get their hands on it, it seems only fair to tell you what's inside. With real numbers, counted just now, not eyeballed.

What you can play today

Two acts. You start in the Woods and end at the Walking Citadel. A run that ends well is about eighteen or nineteen fights: a good forty minutes, if you survive.

Three playable classes, each with its own obsession:

• the Jackal, fast and fragile, living on bleed and combos — hesitate and you die;
• the War Medic, who stacks Pain and detonates it at the right moment, rewarding anyone who plans ahead;
• the Defiled, embers and plates, who takes the hit and burns.

A fourth — the Mutant — is already in the menu, but locked. It's coming.

Eighty cards per class. Not eighty in total: eighty each, with no overlap. That's 240 cards to find, buy, upgrade, and regret leaving in the wrong deck. Two hundred and one are already hand-illustrated; the other thirty-nine still have an emoji where the artwork should be, and no, I'm not going to pretend that's a stylistic choice.

And then: 44 enemies, 22 events, 40 mutations, 10 relics, 6 substances, 10 anatomical trades (yes: pieces of yourself, bartered for power), 8 dwellers of the Dark Line and 4 merchants, each with their own voice.

The things I'm proud of

The bleed that stacks up until you spend it all at once. The Pack Leader, who doesn't roar to rally his own — he's wearing a gas mask, he can't — so he raises his arms and swings his axe overhead instead. Mater Cinerea, who for months was a wall you died of boredom against, and is now a fight where time is on her side.

And the one that pleases me most: the game is fully in Italian and English, line by line. Every card, every event, every sigh from an NPC in the metro.

The things that still don't work

Here I have to be honest, which is more useful than being likeable.

There is no tutorial. None. You start and you fend for yourself, and if three minutes in you haven't worked out what Pain does, that's on me, not you.

The balance is crooked. I know it precisely, because I run thousands of automated games: the Defiled wins far more than the other two classes, and the Jackal struggles more than it deserves to. Fixing this is the next big job.

Act three and the fourth class are missing. The ending in front of you is not the ending.

How to help me

From this build the game has a Discord button on the home screen and at the end of every run — because that's when you actually have something to say, usually something colourful. Press it. Tell me where you got bored, what you didn't understand, which card feels broken.

And if you'd rather not write anything: that's perfectly fine too. The game sends anonymous gameplay statistics — which class, where you died, how long before you quit. No personal data, no link to your account, and there's a switch in Options to turn it off. They serve exactly one purpose: showing me where the game loses people, instead of leaving me to guess.

See you in the ash.