Just a few days before release, Rehaunted has officially passed Steam's build review and gained more than 50.000 wishlists.
The last few weeks have been some of the most intense weeks of development we have ever experienced. We worked day and night, testing, fixing, optimizing, polishing, rebuilding and testing again, because we didn't want to release the game simply because the deadline was approaching.
We wanted to release it when it felt like a game we ourselves would genuinely want to play.
And now, we finally feel that way.
Steam Deck support was extremely important to us. During the final weeks of development, we spent a huge amount of time optimizing Rehaunted, but without sacrificing the visual quality and atmosphere of the game.
After extensive testing and optimization, we’re proud to say that the game is fully playable from beginning to end on Steam Deck. On Medium and High settings, performance is generally around 30-40 FPS and stays above 30 FPS, while Low settings can reach even higher framerates.
FSR or Intel XeSS and Frame Generation need to be enabled to achieve those results.
I personally play on Steam Deck, so making sure Rehaunted could run properly on it was something I really cared about. We’re very proud of the result.
While testing Rehaunted on older laptops, some of them several years old, we realized that performance simply wasn’t where we wanted it to be. We want as many people as possible to be able to play the game.
We added support for DLSS, FSR and Intel XeSS, but we didn’t want to use upscaling as a way to simply hide performance problems.
Instead, we went deep into Unreal Engine itself. We analyzed Stat GPU, Stat Game, animation costs, World Ticks and memory usage, studied the official Unreal Engine documentation, and optimized virtually everything we could. Animations, rendering, lights, ticking, object visibility and background systems.
Across some of our most expensive CPU and GPU metrics, we managed to achieve more than a 2× improvement compared to the original, unoptimized version. Characters and animations now update only when necessary, unnecessary objects stop consuming resources, and many expensive systems were rebuilt or heavily optimized.
As a result, Rehaunted can now run on hardware with as little as 6 GB of VRAM.
We know there is always more that can be optimized, but with the resources available to us, we genuinely pushed it as far as we could and we’re very proud of the result.
Most importantly, we did it without sacrificing the visual quality of the game. We wanted to optimize Rehaunted the old-fashioned way: find the actual bottlenecks, understand them and fix them, instead of simply relying on DLSS, FSR or XeSS to do the work for us.
From the very first announcement, we knew that the visual side and atmosphere of Rehaunted was one of the things people noticed most and it has always been one of our biggest priorities.
Every location was carefully designed and built by hand from the ground up. Every small prop, every piece of debris, every material and environmental detail was deliberately placed to make the house and the other locations feel as believable and lived-in as possible. Nothing was just thrown in randomly, we wanted every space to feel intentional.
Since the trailers and promotional materials were released, we have continued improving the entire visual presentation of the game. What you have seen so far is already outdated.
The final version is more detailed, more atmospheric and much more focused on realism. We reworked lighting, materials, post-processing and countless environmental details to make the world feel more immersive and convincing.
The incredible interest you showed in the game gave us the motivation and opportunity to push it even further than we originally planned, and we are extremely proud of how much the visual quality has evolved.
And one thing we want to make very clear: everything you have seen in our trailers and promotional footage is real-time gameplay. No pre-rendered cinematics, no CGI presentation. Everything is rendered directly inside the game.
We received a lot of interesting and constructive feedback, including some criticism that was harder to hear. We still took all of it seriously.
Because of that, we rebuilt many of the game’s paranormal sequences and changed the way we approach scares, haunting events and supernatural encounters. There are now more story-driven events, more meaningful paranormal moments and more intense encounters with the entity.
We also reworked the way jumpscares are built. Rather than simply trying to surprise the player, we wanted them to feel connected to the environment, story and situation, so the horror feels more natural and makes more sense.
Several mechanics were expanded as well. The Magnifying Glass system was rebuilt to better explain why it can reveal things that normally cannot be seen. We added UV flashlight interactions, new phone-related events, hidden numbers you can call, additional discoveries, a laptop system, a mobile phone and many smaller interactions throughout the game.
Our goal was to make Rehaunted feel packed with content.
Even though the game is designed to last around 2–3 hours, we wanted those hours to be dense with discoveries, events, secrets and new things happening constantly. There should rarely be a moment where you feel like you are simply walking around waiting for something to happen.
Another thing that was extremely important to us was making Rehaunted feel like a place of its own.
A lot of horror games rely heavily on pre-made environments or recognizable asset-pack locations. Once you have seen the same rooms, corridors or layouts across multiple games, some of that mystery and authenticity can disappear.
At the same time, we also want to be completely transparent: we are a very small team with no external funding or large production budget, so in some cases we used existing 3d models where it made sense.
But what mattered to us was how those assets were used.
Every level in Rehaunted was carefully planned and built from the ground up. Every corridor, room and connection between spaces was designed by us, almost like designing a real building, starting with our own layouts and blueprints before recreating them inside the engine.
Every environmental detail was then placed by hand and integrated into a space that had already been deliberately designed.
Our goal was simple: we wanted the locations in Rehaunted to belong only to Rehaunted. We wanted the house and every other area to feel authentic, unfamiliar and carefully constructed, not like somewhere you may have already visited in another game.
That approach took significantly more time, but for us, it was absolutely worth it.
These final weeks changed Rehaunted more than we ever expected. We optimized it, rebuilt parts of it, expanded it and polished it until we reached a point where we could finally say: this is the game we wanted to release.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to take it this far.
Rehaunted launches September 14.
See you inside the house.