Hello Heroes!
Today's the day: The Last Spell officially entered early-access 4 years ago!!
And wow, those 4 years went by so fast. In the meantime, we:
- Left early-access on March 9th 2023
- Released 4 major updates during early-access
- Released 2 full-fledged DLCs + 2 major free updates
- Released 70 (!!) builds of the game
- Sold over 500k units of the game (THANK YOU!!!)
- And so much more!
Words aren't enough to express how grateful we are to the best players in the world: YOU!
We're currently working on the third DLC of the game, and although we cannot say much about it, we CAN say that it will be VERY different from Dwarves of Runenberg and Elves of Amberwald...
So please stay tuned for more news about it!
On another note, last month we launched a little contest to ask YOU for something related to The Last Spell. And we couldn't help but smile (and mayyybe there were some tears involved) at how much this game means to you. Thank you <3
First and foremost, we want to congratulate wuhuli for their amazing comic about The Last Spell.
There are sooo many cool details that we looooved so so much. Thank you for this amazing submission <3 We'll contact you to ask your address to send you a very special TLS shirt!
We also want to highlight some of our other favourite ones!! <3
Adam Janec:
There is so much about it that I love, especially the music, audio-visual feedback and rutheless difficulty. All my favorite games have great music, The Last Spell is one of them. Music is definitely underrated when developing games, but this just hits perfectly and it pays off. Also, The Last Spell was my first pixel-art game that I gave a chance. Pixel art has never grown on me before and I was very sceptical of any pixel-art game. The Last Spell's artstyle is just something else that made me fall in love with pixel-art. Now I'm a big fan of those. Also I always wanted to play turned based combat games, but it has always been such a slog. I lost interest in all of those after several hours, but the fast paced combat in The Last Spell is great. I think i played like 30-40 hours in the first week of playing, I was so hooked in. There is so many things you did well, and especially in fields I lost hope in. It shows that you guys are true gamers.
Phoenix840:
I've never lost a hero to clawers or any of the other enemies (that I remember), but I have blown up several of my own heroes via collateral damage. The first and most memorable was when I first discovered friendly fire, by accident. Final night of Gildenburg vs the final Harpy. I had one hero hitting the Harpy in melee range to whittle it down, but it wasn't quite enough. One of my other heroes had a lightning scroll from the book of shadows. Cast it on the Harpy. Killed the Harpy and won the run, but it also killed my hero who was standing right next to the Harpy when it propagated. That's when I realized I shouldn't do that in the future.
The second time was when I had a hero who got hurt real bad during Glenwald, so he hung back and attacked at range. Well, there was another ranged hero with a cannon right next to him. I didn't pay attention to the overheat status, and despite being very careful to keep the wounded hero from the hoard, the real enemy was the cannon's overheat. He didn't survive the night.
There have also been a couple BOOM related incidents. I won't go into details, but wow that's a powerful perk, and I can confirm it does also hurt your other heroes. Doesn't matter how much HP, armor, and block you have, when your ally overkills a basic clawer with a 3k damage critical, you're not likely to survive the splash damage.
elementalscion:
My first time breaking Glenwald's seal was a turning point for me (screenshot attached). Up until that point, I had been just barely getting by, and had already failed Glenwald previously. I ended up beating the dryads on turn 13 (which I remember being described as "impressively slow") with the magic circle on the brink of destruction. Something clicked with me after that run, and I went on to beat Elderlicht on my first try. I think that Glenwald run was the point where I really started loving the game.
MSC:
Beating Lakeburg for the first time, with one injured hero left, the entire haven covered in monsters, final barrier breached, down to the last mage, and with a final action point to crit a backstab on Cetusia. I call this final image of what remained "The last turn."
Morel/The Cat Game Master
I remember playing the Prologue when it came out. The same day on which the game went into early access, I bought it. It immediately became one of my all time favourite games, for 3 major reasons:
First of all, the game hits so many of my soft spots: I do love rogue likes, tactical strategies, brutal difficulties, pixel art, as well as dark fantasy settings. The Last Spell was, and still is, one of more unique and special games to me, which others can't match in the same way.
Secondly, the music. Few of the tracks from the OST are in my playlist, and the whole OST is used by me to this very day in all my TTRPG games as ambience & combat music. It is so good!
And lastly, the game inspired me quite a lot. The whole appeal of the game, and all the mechanics, ended up pushing me to create something very special to me. Around 2-3 years ago, I made a simple TTRPG inspired by The Last Spell, called ''Fighters of The Dawn''. Few of my friends already played it, and I hope to run some more games in it :D I'm still improving it, but I have way too many of other projects. While it is hard to show such a thing as a whole, I've sent some screenshots here, to give a vague idea about it. Also, can't wait for the board game to come. I'm gonna use the minis for this game of mine as well xd
Sean Murphy:
Its hard to pick a particular reason from the rather impressive list. I think at my core, the one that resonates with me the most is simply how it tells a story but leaves room for interpretation and imagination. Which might sound silly or weird, but, I miss the days where you had more games that could do that. To be able to have a structure of a world but the ability to make up things in your head as you go along, essentially story building between your characters. The fact that the 'player character' is faceless and driven by your dialogue choices further allow for that element and allow you to sort of sink into the story.
To me, thats echoing of things from the likes Elder Scrolls, Sims, Dark Souls, RPGs of long days past, etc. Where you are there to do a job, but the journey along the way is what sticks with you because of how much you get to make it.
Boo-Sama:
I placed a legend to follow in the image, so I'll just start with members from Team 1, my first game, to 8, my latest as of now.
-Team 1: My first team mostly went off without a hitch besides the entire city being on fire by the end of the boss, and me only succeeding because all other enemies dying after the last harpy dropped. Karola was honestly just an archer, but she stuck with me because she was my wake-up-call to how important mana management was in this game.
-Team 2: The entire team, Silkstorm, Tomaz, Samara, and ESPECIALLY Taillefer were all a joy to play with up until I got a wake-up-call to how much more difficult Lakeburg was compared to Gildenberg. Tomaz was the smelly neckbeard nerd who CONSTANTLY messed up or missed spells, Taillefer talked like that one "Old Spice" commercial guy who says "THE TICKETS ARE NOW DIAMONDS" while zipping around the place with the pistol, and Silkstorm hated both of them an wanted to go home. Samara was a late pickup who had the "Pirate" trait, and that just really stuck with me.
Sadly they're probably all dead, I don't know what canonically happens in the game after a loss, but I hope they're fine. Taillefer won't be the same though, he had a near death experience one turn and became a sniper instantly (coward).
-Team 3): I started with team 2 a bit once I found the button, but this is where I started getting a lot more invested in personally editing characters. I remember not liking ANY of the randomly generated characters (except stormy), so I just completely overhauled them myself. Lesie was a CQC mage who craved violence at all times, Stormy was my first attempt at making a proper sniper (failed), and Dewstinger was also there. There was also a dwarf who died on the turn everything went to hell due to a straggler crawler and this was my first introduction to mortality in the game. Leslie might not have played a super important role gamewise, but she would linger a bit into the next team.
-Team 4: Layla came in to avenge her sister with her friends Tanek and Miguel and by god THEY DID. Layla was the support mage, Tanek was the rogue, and Miguel the tank. They later picked up Arundurina, a weirdo none of them really wanted on the team, but her resume was completely spotless and she had a cannon which they needed, so they picked her up and she acted as the long-range watchtower support, and was honestly a massive MVP throughout the entire game clutching important last-minute kills while also covering any blindspots the team had, all from the center of the map! They also picked up Acel, who mysteriously died when Tanek picked the "KA-BOOM" perk and shot a little too close to him. Tanek has never fully explained what happened and his profile picture changed from a smile to a distant glance.
To fill in the empty slot, Dunvarlina (Or Hunvarlina? I dunno) was recruited and was my introduction to making a proper siege unit who managed the turrets, manned a catapult, and kept the hoards at bay with the druid staff's slows while the turrets chewed them up. Zaniel was picked up with the spare money we had before the boss as a throw-away glass canon to help fend off hoard and chip at whatever the boss would be (I didn't know at the time). Dunvarlina ALMOST died, but we managed to clutch a win before she could.
-Team 5: Honestly I just wanted to unlock apocalypse modifers in Gildenburg.Gaelle looked cool though.
-Team 6: I actually missed recording one team I think, my first Glenwald team (it went very badly) so I went back to Lakenburg with some apocalypse modifiers on to get some practice and grind some stats.
Zuzanna is by far my FAAAVORITE character I've had generate. I only needed to give her a few tweaks to her appearance. She was a sociopathic fisherwoman who swept through entire hoards using a dagger, and a sword for mobility mixed with a side-arm pistol and scepter for momentum attacks. Gorvarlina was also cool being the big tank, but Zuzanna was SO MUCH FUN to roleplay and use, saying stuff like "I'm gonna gut you like a fish :)" before one-hitting a Bulky while everyone else watched in horror. I actually had to hold myself back from executing Prisha when she was badly wounded one time because Zuzanna had the badge that gave her the ability to execute ANY unit that was badly wounded, Including Prisha for some reason, and character-speaking Zuzanna absolutely would have done it, but I had to justify not doing it because Prisha was out entire backlane support... A part of me wishes I did though, for the funny, but the team would have been doomed if I had.
Zuzanna destroyed the sea-monster easily, and I'm trying to make her in a 3D game I play. She's not done but I wanted to get this in while the contest is active, so I'll keep you updated on that.
-Team 7: Honestly everything with this team was going fine until the boss. See, 2 of them were glass-canon snipers, and I was not expecting the boss to have a global attack with massive siege-destroying splash damage.
I never want to go back to Runenburg. The aftermath of the run is the background of the image, if you're curious.
Team 8: Finally we reach the last run I did, which was my Glenwald redemption run. Comapred to the Zuzanna run, it was very standard, but some highlights were how unstoppably strong Katharine was as a tank, killing EVERYTHING with spikey counter recoil that touched her, and her armor seemingly never breaking to anything, Duskclaw's constant positioning issues, and Durhunvar the Veteran being the siege captain/sniper that flew all across the map to help everyone in need, but I wanted to specifically pay some tribute to Belstinger.
Belstinger struggled finding a place on the team all game, jumping from being a sniper, to an assist mage, to finally an isolation assassin near the very end, but constantly struggling to keep up due to being very frail. Near the end though when the Dryads attacked and everyone was scattered trying to deal with the oncoming hoard and the constant plant spawns, another Dryad spawned near the top of the map Keen, the resident "Dryad Killer" with his orb with 2 death ray charges, could not reach before the turn was over. Belstringer, however, was able to reach it and take it down before we had to deal with ANOTHER wave of plant spawns, but losing her life just after managing to do so.
It's kind of a tragic story, like she finally found her place on the team, but lost her life right at the end when the sun was starting to shine. It's these little moments like this that really make me love The Last Spell! It can be funny, it can be scary, it can be sad, but it brings out all these unique emotions I don't normally feel playing most games, and I appreciate it a lot for that (even if most of it is just me being autistic and clingy with randomly generated characters I can edit)
That's my stories! Even if this doesn't win, I hope you enjoyed reading them and hope the dev-team and the fans have a great day!!!
Thank you so much for all those amazing stories and contributions <3 We have the best players, and we CANNOT wait for you to discover what we're working on for the DLC 3. It's going to be good.