Hello everyone! ːtaffyː
First of all, we wish each and everyone of you an happy new year, may 2026 be a great year for you! ːmeltadaːOn our side 2025 was an amazing year! We announced our new game Fallen Fates, we kept making great updates for Astral Ascent including new DLCs and collabs with games we love : Children of Morta and Dead Cells.
We improved the overall game experience and it ended up being our best selling year for Astral Ascent, so thank you all so much for your trust in us and we are super motivated to keep bringing new updates and improve the game in 2026 starting today with the release of Update 2.5 : The Ravenswatch Sentinel, our 16th major update for Astral Ascent!
Before jumping into the content of this update and what comes next, we wanted to let you know about Ravenswatch if you don't know about it!
View game pageThey have an amazing set of characters, you can play it in co-op, it plays and feels amazing! They are also french developers and seeing how much they care about their game made us want to make a collab with them and we are so happy they accepted ːmelhappyː
When we announced this collab, someone from the community made this comment :
We could not agree more, they have been making great updates, great content and today they just released a new playable character : Merlin!
Don't hesitate to check their game if you haven't already ːzagplsːWe even have a bundle with them !
View game page
Let's get back to Astral Ascent update!
You can find full Patch Notes here -
View game page
New Room : The Hourglass of Dreams
Inspired by the world of Reverie, the Sandman will allow you to upgrade your gambits rarity level for Quartz.
We think it wasn't fun to refresh many times the Itinerant Merchant at Andromeda's Bar to find higher gambits to improve your builds so we came up with this idea of being able to use your quartz but to increase gambits you already have so taking a common Gambit can be useful and you can level it up later!
It can also make your negative gambits become positive gambits!
New Echoes : The Vengeful Echoes
You can take 1 of these echoes when you visit the Hourglass of Dreams room, they are stronger than regular echoes and can only be found there. They are strong but they require a sacrifice, you need to sacrifice an Echo you already have in order to get one of them.
We think it's a great thing because if you have an echo made for a build you dont want you can exchange it for an echo that will work for your build as the 5 new echoes conver all the builds elements!
Improved onboarding
You may have noticed we had a delay on our announced 2.5 update which was supposed to be about improved onboarding and Ravenswatch collab was supposed to be 2.6 but the delays made us merge both updates in today's update and we could not do all the improvements for onboarding we had in mind we still made some of them!
The onboarding changes are there because you are so many telling us Astral Ascent has a lot of depth and is great to play but it also has a lot of mechanics to learn when starting the game and we hope new players can learn these mechanics more progressively to not feel overwhelmed!
The number of Prowess choices has been increased from 3 to 4 (or from 2 to 3 with DL debuff)
The Prowess Statues now are unlocked over time to not give overwhelming informations from the start.
Imprints and blueprint spawn appear later in the game experience
Added hints about the currencies
The Star Guardians has been separated in 3 difficulty tiers:
"Easy" ones
- Pegasus
- Lupus
"Medium" ones
- Hydra
- Draco
"Hard" ones
- Monoceros
- Sculptor
Now you'll have to defeat 2 times Easy bosses (any) to unlock Medium ones, and defeat 2 times Medium ones (any) to unlock Hard ones. This change has been made to balance more the difficulty of the Star Guardian for new players.
A word about the Charity DLC
Thanks so much to everyone for the reception of the Charity DLC :
We have sold more than 8700 units of the DLC and we will be donating soon to the association what we collected in 2025 and doing the same every year!
Though we don't want to discount this DLC because it all goes to charity we added it to the bundle of game + DLCs so you can have a 10% off from it if it's the only DLC you are missing!
View game page
What is coming next?
Next update is supposed to be the Steam Workshop, we started working on several very cool features including sprites replacement, level design editor and more but it suffers several delays out of our control so we have to reorganize our schedule about it but don't worry we are already working on new content including Arven new playable character, the boss rush and more!
We also have many ideas to improve the run experiences and make the game even funnier!
One of our biggest surprise for Astral Ascent is also coming in 2026, something that has been in the work for more than a year now and it's so hard to keep the secret but 2026 is the year of the reveal so stay tuned for that!
To sum things up : a lot is coming, thanks so much for sticking with us, have a great time ingame and have an excellent week ːzagplsː
-The Hibernian Workshop Team