Hello everyone,
We’ve been hard at work on Neverway, but we’ve made the difficult decision to shift the release date to 2027.
Our process has always been about understanding what you, as a player, are feeling when you play the game and making sure that aligns with the story. Seeing how the prologue resonated with so many of you, along with internal playtests, inspired us on how the later parts of Neverway could take shape. We want to keep trusting our process and follow the game where it wants to go.
This means some of the original chapters and areas grew in a way we hope will meet your expectations. We believe in this game's potential, which is why we decided to take this extra time to make it the very best version it can be. And don’t worry, we don’t plan on growing it any more than that. As much as we love working on Neverway, we know you’re excited to play it too and don’t want to delay it again.
Working on this game as a small team of 3 (plus a few collaborators) has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and we wouldn't be able to do this without everyone's love and support for Neverway!
As a way to thank you for your patience, we want to give you some exclusive insight into our development process and more about how the gameplay works.
A peek into development
Our current work-in-progress playtest build reached 20 hours of playtime, so we decided to crunch some numbers for fun!
- 250+ different routines implemented across our characters
- 35+ world “areas”
- 100+ interactive cutscenes throughout the game
- 425k+ lines of code (…this one is probably meaningless, unless you’re a nerd like me)
We expect these numbers to continue to grow as we work towards finishing the game.
Aaand now that we finished narrowed down the remaining of our planned content, we can officially confirm something we’ve been wanting to say for a while...
Neverway will have multiple endings!
Some are good. Or maybe evil. Depends on your point of view. We are trying to avoid “bad endings” and just making them interesting in different ways!
We also know a lot of you were asking for more insight into what the gameplay looks like, so we’d like to share more about that without revealing too many spoilers.
Making friends
There’s over 20 characters that you get to meet throughout the story, and you may pursue the romance route with 12 of them!
Romance is completely optional. Now, on the other hand, how much you show up for your friendships may be directly tied to the ending of the game...
Most of them can help in one way or another, whether that is dealing with debuffs, hacking computers or getting a cup of coffee in the morning.
Gunter can serve you coffee as long as it’s not one of his days off.
And, if you get close enough to someone, you can even go out on dates.
Rebuilding your life
Our goal with the life sim aspects is not for them to be an end in themselves, but rather to support the story and make Neverway's world feel more alive.
For example, selling your crops can be a great way to pay your mortgage (every Treeday), but you can also use them to prepare snacks, making your day a bit easier to manage.
Speaking of money, you can also use it to buy all sorts of things at Sellmart, such as DeXaFlon, decoration for your house or a brand new scooter! Or you can just get a part-time job there.
Reading manuals, building, and crafting is how you progress main areas of the game and help characters with their predicaments. However, you can also make things for yourself, such as a bubble gun, pockets that increase your inventory, or an umbrella for rainy days.
Fighting through horrors
As you go deeper into the story, you will have to fight. Areas will get increasingly more dangerous the farther away you are from home.
Fortunately, if you are nice to your friends, you can use their soulbonds to fight! That's what friends are there for...
We really appreciate all the feedback from everyone who played our prologue regarding the combat. We’ve already been making improvements to the default controls for keyboard and controller, as well as the stamina system and the overall feel.
Ultimately, Neverway is a story about your journey, as Fiona, in a weird and strange place.
The world, relationships, combat, farming, crafting: everything is there to make the story feel more alive and to let you shape what happens along the way.
We’re very excited about where Neverway is heading, and we’re looking forward to sharing more of it with you as we get closer to 2027. Once we’re ready to announce the new release date, we’ll let you know! You can follow us on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter/X, Bluesky, or join our Discord or newsletter for notifications.
Thank you!
🩸 Coldblood Inc. team