Greetings lost souls!
The big news is that we have released the official Steam Demo for Heretical last week!
That's a really big milestone for us, since this is the first time that Heretical is publicly available for anyone to try.
Also, we've already released two patches for the Demo, which fix some of the bugs that were found, as well as introduce some new game mechanics and a couple of smaller improvements. You can check the full list of the changes here: Changelog
One of the major improvements to the Demo, and the game itself, came with the update 0.1.6d on July 15th, where we've introduced Cursed Items. This mechanic makes the Darkness and the fight with the Unnamed Abyss actually worthwhile.
Here's how it works:
When the Darkness consumes you and you manage to fight your way out of it, your highest-quality item gets cursed. In this process, it gains 1 or 2 powerful additional stats, as well as one detrimental effect.
However, cursed items can't be replaced by normal means, meaning you won't be able to simply discard it by picking up another item for that slot. Instead, whenever you kill a Boss enemy, such as Matron Amara, one random Cursed item will be cleansed - it will retain one of the bonus stats, lose the detriments, and become discardable again.
This way you can increase the potency of your items, but you'll have to take extra care about killing enemies and choosing which path to take in order to utilize a cursed item to its fullest potential.
We're having soooo much fun with Cursed Items, so we hope you'll enjoy this mechanic as much as we do!
That’s all for now, talk to you soon.
Three Swords Studio