Hi everyone!
I can finally announce that Virtue’s Heaven will be released on May 20th 2025 and to celebrate(?) this milestone, I went ahead and released a completely new demo for it as well.
The demo should take somewhere between 20-60 minutes to play (probably more towards the 20 minute range tbh) and features the first bigger area of the game, as well as some side paths.
Virtue’s Heaven is a bit particular in some ways, so I want point some things out for the demo that I feel might be worth pointing out, just in case people run into them:
- Please do yourself a favour and play the game with a controller. Virtue’s Heaven does have fully customizable keyboard controls, but from prior feedback and my own experiences, it’s not a very pleasant game to play that way. Should you happen to play it with a keyboard anyway and happen to find a setup that works for you, please let me know.
- Steam says the game is only playable via an Xbox controller, but from what I can tell, it should work with any kind of controller. It might be that you need to rebind some buttons, but the game should at least register it. If something isn’t working, let me know and I’ll look into it.
- A fairly important part of the tutorial seems to be buggy. If you are stuck at this spot:
You need to attack the wall/destroy the lanterns in that area until those five bars in your top UI are full and then press the “charge attack” button (default is ‘B’ on an Xbox controller) while standing relatively close to it.
- In general: There are no upgrades that gate progress in the game. If you are stuck somewhere that means that you haven’t found the way forward yet, not because you are lacking a specific piece of equipment. The game doesn’t work like that.
- I don’t quite know yet if your progress in the demo will carry over into the full game, so please don’t expect it right now.
- If you’re trying to hug one of your friends and they just vanish, that’s because I haven’t done their animations yet, not because they secretly resent you.
- Any feedback and bug reports are welcome, however unless it’s something very critical, I probably won’t spend a lot of time fixing things in the demo itself. The full game is supposed to come out in three months and I need to make sure that I get everything right until then.
With all that being said: I hope you all have a good time with the game. It’s been a real struggle to get it into shape and I’m both very excited and incredibly scared to share it with people.
P.S.: Let me know should you run the demo on a Steam Deck. It should work (all my other games do), but I have no means to test it myself.
