Hi everyone! Welcome to our FIRST update for Malys in Early Access!

In case you missed it, we wrote a devlog after the release talking through all the feedback we'd received and what we'd be focusing on for this update. Going through it agauin now, we got through even more than we thought we might.

We've been reading all your posts, reviews, comments, and submissions, and using them to work out our major focus areas as we go forward. This patch, we've tried to resolve a whole bunch of important fixes as reported by you!

Our First Early Access Update!

We've been hard at work since launch doing our best to make the play experience as smooth as possible, iron out as many issues as we can, and start to plan The Future Of Malys. It's been a lot of fun. Normally when we work on projects, the things you make don't get player feedback until the game comes out - so the gap between making something and releasing it into the world is measured in years. With Early Access, we get to measure that gap in weeks, and that's genuinely exciting for us!

The focus of this initial update has been on improving the play experience and solving issues, but we've also started to work on new content for you to check out.

Early Access Update v0.2 - New Content

Firstly, we've added three new demons - one more Lesser Demon, and two Greater Demons (previews from Region 2). Both Greater Demons hit harder than the Region 1 demons, and we have put them in the second half of the current run as a result.

We know many of you have been trying different builds and approaches, so we're eager to hear your feedback on how your strategies need adjusting or shifting with these new demons! We don't want to spoil them, so here's your treat.

Who's that horrifying disfigured broken demon? It's... you'll see!

We've also added a number of new allies, who have different supporting abilities or interactions depending on where you encounter them. Some of these new allies are gained through new random encounters, others are in the general card reward pool!

NEW DEMONS

• Lesser Demon: The Lesser

• Greater Demon (Region 2 preview): Vishaak

• Greater Demon (Region 2 preview): Wager Demon

NEW ALLIES

• The Investigator (+ new random scene to gain his aid)

• The Believer

• The Guardian

• The Backup (+ new random scene to gain his aid)

• The Spectre

• The Occultist (+ new random scene to gain his aid)

NEW CARDS

• A Cry For Help

• Aid From Beyond

• Tie Them Down!

• Gratitude

OTHER CHANGES

• All Greater Demons, as well as Mammon, are now more difficult! We expect to completely overhaul difficulty as part of a big balance review in the future, but for now, we hope this helps make things a little more interesting.

• The Doubt status has been redesigned. Previously, Doubt gave a 70% chance of redirecting targeted actions to a random target. The new design gives a 30% chance that any targeted action will miss and have no effect. We would love feedback on how this feels!

• The Wisp now does its effects at the beginning of the player's turn

• Redesigned the Nun ally with a focus on Light and Glow, rather than damage dealing

• Expose has an additional more damaging attack added in, and demon Countdown actions have been buffed to make them more significant

• Increased the Faith reward for Lesser Demons to 15, and Greater Demons to 35 to see how this feels in terms of purchasing from shops in game. [[b]Note: These numbers will be entirely reworked in a future update, along with the entire economy, so this is just for now!]

• Some of you reported the 'Skip Storylet' button appears before the storylet itself. This is intentional, so players can quickly skip through narrative if that's their preference without having to wait for the text to load first. We made some improvements to how it displays to make this a little clearer.

Early Access Update v0.2 - Bugfixes

Many players who played for a while reported a slowdown to gameplay, where actions would take way longer than expected to trigger. We realised this was an issue with Allies from former exorcisms continuing to fight the good fight, even when those exorcisms were over. We believe we've resolved this issue, but we need your help to know if it's 100% fixed!

We are indeed playable on Steam Deck, as confirmed by Valve - there's a lot of work to come to make Steam Deck work well however, and is planned for further down the line alongside controller support. Proceed with caution as it is not optimized for Steam Deck at this stage!

We also hear you on the text being small. Text size is a larger (no pun intended) challenge as it affects a number of UI/UX elements, so let us know if the adjustments we've made to tooltips and similar have made things easier for you to read as we continue to explore what's possible.

You'll notice some content may have changed or be missing - as an example, one Curio currently crashes the game for players, so we've removed it for now as we investigate the issue further.

Here's what's in the update!

UI/UX & TEXT FIXES

• Tooltips are no longer obscured by other gameplay elements, ensuring readability

• Cards added to player's hand during demon turn no longer appear before the VFX or phase transition that creates them

• Allies & minions no longer disappear before the effect/action that kills them has visually occurred

• Tooltips no longer get stuck if visible when debuff expires

• Rogue tooltips on hidden elements no longer appear on mouseover when they were not supposed to

• Artifact and curio icons no longer duplicate

• Curios on the side bar in exorcisms now scale correctly on hover

• Automatically appended card behaviour keywords now have correct formatting in card descriptions (Miracle, Pocket, etc.)

• Fixed positioning issues of items in Lydia's shop

• Angel, Gideon and Lydia's shops now all display the correct background image for each

• Cold Iron Chain and Divine Spark curios now display the correct icons

• Player area status tooltips are now larger and more readable

• Tooltips no longer scale if there are more than 2 on a card

• Card text no longer cuts off preventing readibility of text

• Card types now display correctly without CT_ prefix

• Attached tooltips to some cards missing them (eg. Bound By Silver, The Wisp, and others)

• Fixed typos in various storylets

• Fixed broken node link in "Flame & Fury" demon prelude that was preventing several parts of the scene from appearing in one of the variants

• Fixed broken mark-up showing in storylet text

• Fixed some text display issues in encounters/preludes

• Fixed several incorrect numbers for Demon Intent damage and Ward preview

GAMEPLAY FIXES

• Repeated use of Allies no longer slow down card actions over the course of a run

• Achievements should now function correctly

• Curse cards no longer trigger the Priest's ability (preventing Infestation from becoming an infinite source of damage)

• Allies no longer continue their effects after death (e.g. Priest still doing damage)

• Minions can no longer hurt you once they are dead

• You can no longer target the Host in Expose or Endure phases

• Faith can no longer drop below 0 after random encounters

• Head minion now correctly applies Wrath to the demon when damaged by The Priest or Nun

• Fixed miscellaneous issues where demons were not targeting the player correctly, and applying unintended debuffs to themselves or were otherwise not applying effects correctly

• Fixed project name to read Malys instead of Ceres (you didn't see anything)

• Fixed several texture resolution issues

• "Aftermath" random scene now correctly offers The Nun OR special new Gratitude card

• Upgraded God's Hand now uses correct values (4 damage per card in hand, rather than 2)

• Cards now correctly visually update when their cost changes during a turn (fixing Faith Restored and others)

QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS

• Card targets now appear as soon as you have selected or start to drag a card

• Cards with no specific target now have a clear target zone for play to maintain behavioural consistency

• Improved tooltip display to better manage multiple tooltips at once on screen

• Improved the feel and accuracy of card selection

• Card reward selection now requires confirmation, and for Greater Demons, you are now told how many cards you can select

• Tooltips have been significantly rewritten and reworked for clarity, and now dynamically display stack amount where relevant

• Card Reward popup now displays all cards at the same size so they are readable, regardless of if 3 or 5 options are showing

• Increased speed of many UI animations including ally ability activation, menus and more

• Added text formatting to card and curio descriptions

• Status tooltips now include icons for ease of understanding what is what

• If you have selected all rewards or consequences, you no longer have to click through multiple confirmations to progress

• Card selection in Reward screen now has a more visible visual impact with some new VFX

• Updated some card descriptions to be more specific (eg. Devouring Greed)

• Updated Early Access tutorial text to be more specific and clear

• Added Patch Notes into the game and updated version to v.02

TEMPORARY REMOVALS

• Removed "Camped Out" random scene as it was crashing the game (don't worry, we'll fix it and put it back in in a future update!)

• Removed Black Censer while it is being fixed

Things We're Working On

Alongside new content and continued bug-fixes, there are a few specific things we're working on for future updates. We'll talk about this more next week, but here's a quick overview:

• We know there's a lot of work to be done in regards to Demon Intent - making it clear what the demon will be doing next, who it targets, and for how much damage. We are currently working on a redesigned version of our Intent system to help clarify all of this, so stay tuned for that in a future update.

• We are working on a way to ensure damage amounts on cards etc. show exactly how much damage they will actually do, inclusive of any modifiers (such as Wrath or Shackle). This is a fairly big overhaul and may take some time, but we'll give an update when we can.

• We have a prospective fix for the Card Draw/Infinite Draw loop, we just need a little more time to make sure it works and is interesting in and of itself. You can expect this in the next update!

• The ability to view your Draw and Discard piles in exorcisms is on its way as well.

Current known issues:

• If you abandon a run and then start a new one without quitting entirely, a myriad of potential issues can ensue such as doubling cards, demons becoming un-targetable, infinite loading screens, and more. The easiest fix for now is to quit out and restart!

• Multiple minions doing actions (particularly the Feed minions) feel very slow

• The Center Must Hold card is broken and its effects are persistent

• Some cards have the wrong art in Gideon's shop

• Pocket needs reworking as it is currently somewhat broken

• Healing allies is missing proper VFX and instead shows some fun white boxes

• If a demon gives you cards on its turn, you massively overdraw - you should draw as many cards remain to reach a total of 6 instead

• Storylet skip doesn't work consistently the same way, and the Continue button is too far away from the final line for comfort

• Damage rounding being inconsistent is causing minor variances in some damage numbers

What We Need From You

Please keep giving us your balance feedback - everything we receive about whether it's too easy, too hard, cards being over or underpowered, is super useful in us starting to map out where our balance changes will come in. We're resolving broken balance or unintended designs first and foremost as we continue to add content, so as mentioned previously, a lot of the balance changes are yet to come.

You can submit all your feedback on exorcisms (and the new content we've added, and bugs we've hopefully fixed) via bit (dot) ly / malysfeedback. If you run into a new bug, you can submit it at bit (dot) ly / malysbugreport

What we'd love to hear about this week is specifically around exorcisms - what do you like about them, what don't you like, what do you wish was happening? So tell us - what are your favourite and least favourite exorcisms, and why?

Stay Up To Date

We’ll be in touch next week on the devlog to talk about what we’re finding out from your feedback and what we’ll be focusing on for the following patch. For now, if you've enjoyed the game and haven't reviewed it yet - please do! Every review helps us get visibility, which helps us bring in more players and get more feedback to help improve Malys.

We'll also be posting on our socials when the devlog goes live, so stay in touch via Bluesky or sign up to our mailing list.

Speak soon, exorcists!