Hey everyone!

The 0.4 Update is now officially available!

Thank you to everyone who played the public beta and shared their feedback. You found bugs, pointed out things that needed some work, and helped us improve the update before its full release.

A quick note about your save files:

If you’ve been thinking about starting a fresh run, now is a really good time to do it. With all the recent tweaks and the feedback you gave us, we're hoping the early game just feels a lot more fun to play through now.

But don't worry, if you just want to jump right back into your current run, your existing saves are perfectly safe and will work just fine with the new update! (fingers crossed)

Along with everything introduced in the public beta, we made the following changes based on your feedback:
🟡 When you start a new Prestige, you can now read through all previous lore pages, even if you didn’t manage to unlock every page.
🟡 Fixed a bug related to the Severed Hand. It now spawns Whispers as intended.
🟡 After unlocking the upgrade that allows you to sacrifice Whispers, you can now continue spawning new Whispers.
🟡 The game already had an autosave system, but we’ve also added a manual save option with this update.

Plus:

🟡 The drawings in the Stillness Engine panel have been updated and should look much better now.
🟡 We completed a full editorial pass. Some of the wording in the UI was too cryptic or didn’t communicate things clearly enough, so we rewrote and improved it.
🟡 The story now continues in Arc III: The Stillness Engine, with 10 new story pages to unlock and read.

German Translation Is Now Available!

Huge shoutout to our awesome community member, Ema, who took the time to translate the entire game into German!

We can’t thank her enough for all the time and work she put into it. She also asked us to keep an eye out for your feedback. So, if you're playing in German and run into any typos or lines that feel a bit clunky, please let us know so we can tweak them!

Steam Community Items Are Finally Here!

Trading cards, badges, profile backgrounds, and profile pictures are now available for Cult of the Yellow King!
This is the first time we’ve added Steam Community Items for a game, and we’re very happy to finally have them available. Animated versions will also be coming to the Points Shop soon!

A Question About the Relic System:

We’ve seen some criticism about Relics becoming permanent once you commit them to the Yellow King, so we wanted to ask what you think.
We made this choice for both story and gameplay reasons. We want picking a Relic to feel like an important decision, so once you commit it, you can’t take it back.
That said, we’re still open to changing things based on your feedback. We’re planning to have 21 Relics in total, so you’ll eventually have a much bigger pool to choose from and a lot more possible combinations.
Knowing that, how do you feel about committed Relics being permanent? We’d really love to hear your thoughts.

A Note About AI:

We are reading every review and discussion post. We noticed two reviews claiming that AI was used in the game, so we wanted to address this here.

We want to make it completely clear that no generative AI tools were used in any part of the game.
Every single word was written by human hands. The same goes for the art, code, and music.

We know how much the creative environment has changed and that people are constantly questioning whether something was made with AI. We find ourselves constantly questioning the media we consume, too. We are all navigating this weird new environment together, and it's natural to have your guard up.

Our team is made up of artists (or at least we see ourselves as art people) whether it’s storytelling, visuals, music, or code.

With AI moving so quickly into creative spaces, it was important for us to draw a clear line. We truly believe that the soul of the games we love comes from the people who make them, and we hope that doesn’t change. It might feel like we’re picking a small fight in a massive industry, but it’s one we’re fully committed to.

A Note About Development and Expectations:

We also want to take a moment to talk about some recent feedback regarding the game’s current state and future.

We read a review saying that the game still needs more content and build variety, that updates are slow, and that it may never leave Early Access. These are fair observations about where the game is right now.

We’re a team of just three people working on the game around our day jobs. Hopefully, one day we can make indie games full-time. We really, really would love that. (I hate my corporate job.)

But we’re still here, still working on the game, and fully committed to finishing it and leaving Early Access (hopefully very soon now). Even if updates take longer than some of you would like, please know that we’re genuinely doing our best.

Thank you for being patient with us and supporting our little game.

And thank you again to everyone who played the beta and shared their feedback. We hope you enjoy the update!

A Tease of What's Next:

We’ll continue reading your feedback, fixing any issues that come up with 0.4, but we are already working on the next content drop, which will introduce The new 15 Relics.

And for those following the story, here’s a small line from the upcoming Story Arc IV:

“We are no longer a tumor in the woods.
We are the cancer in the blood.
We carry the mold to the cities.
To the veins of the world.”

P.S. A Little Thank You:

Since you read all the way to the end, we wanted to do a small giveaway. If you want to check out our other game, the cyberpunk-noir RPG Celestial Return, here are a few Steam keys!
To keep the bots from stealing them, we’ve hidden the last characters.

Key 1: QZGC5-K6EXD-LBJH? (Replace the ? with the first letter of the word "Yellow")
Key 2: XZ76C-FWWDQ-707Y? (Replace the ? with the first letter of the word "King")
Key 3: 7BLZ6-C69YW-D0T8? (Replace the ? with the first letter of the word “Early Access”)