Hey everyone, Akira here, Game Director of Kernel Hearts.
Today, I'm very happy to announce that Kernel Hearts will be launching one month from now, on September 17th!
To celebrate, we decided to update the Demo one last time before release.
Japanese Voice Acting
Japanese VO has been added to the game!
Make sure to start a New Game to enjoy all the story scenes with the new Japanese voice acting.
Attending these recording sessions was a dream come true for me. Watching the actors bring these characters to life was incredibly fun, and easily one of the highlights of this year.
Balance
We've listened to a lot of your feedback, and as a result we've done some pretty significant rebalancing across both the game's combat and economy.
For combat, we've adjusted most Mementos and Relics so they scale better with player level, while also rebalancing them to make every choice feel more rewarding to use.
Some of the ones that rely more heavily on scaling might still miss the mark a little in the Demo because of its shorter runs, but hopefully the overall feeling of getting stronger throughout a run feels much better now.
Keep in mind that the Demo only has 2 floors, while the full game has around 7! Things are expected to get considerably crazier later in a full run than what we're able to show during Demo sessions.
We've also adjusted enemy numbers throughout the game to make encounters feel less spongy while still maintaining the level of challenge we're aiming for.
On the economy side, we've made exploring and fighting the random enemies around the map much more rewarding. They now have a significantly higher chance of dropping Lost Wishes, alongside an overall rebalance of chest loot tables.
Languages
We've removed the placeholder translations and are now only keeping the professionally translated languages in the Demo.
Some players asked us to keep the placeholders because they still helped them play the game even if they knew little or no English, but we also don't want new players to see those translations and assume they represent the quality we're aiming for in the final game.
So for now, we'd rather only include languages that properly reflect the experience we want to deliver.
Visuals
We've improved a lot of the UI to make it feel sharper and more responsive, alongside updates and improvements to many enemy VFX.
Performance
We've also been working extensively on improving performance throughout the game.
So far we've seen some pretty significant improvements, and the game should now run considerably better on lower-end PCs.
If you have a potato PC and want to help us test it, please get in touch with us on Discord and let us know how it runs!
As always, thank you so much to everyone who took the time to read this, play the Demo, and send us feedback.
I also encourage you to check out the latest trailer we've made. It's a bit slower-paced than some of our previous ones, but I think it turned out very cool.
See you in Babel!