The Last Spell news & patch notes

Hello Heroes!

Today, we are pausing our regular program to celebrate Blightstone's latest update, from our friends at Unfinished Pixel!

With a new story, increased difficulty, and additional variety including anomalies, enemy variants, and runes, there's a whole lot to experience for both existing and new players alike. In celebration, a bundle of The Last Spell and Blightstone is also OUT NOW! If you already own either game, you may simply complete the set, and take on the challenge of another dark fantasy roguelike. 😉

Take care! <3

Hello Heroes!

A new hotfix has just arrived!

We've fixed some reported issues on The Last Spell!

BUGFIX

• Fixed an issue where Falcon Seed and Snake Seed didn’t count for the “Commander of Amberwald” condition “hit enemies with seed skills

• Fixed issues where Big Stomp would trigger even without a target, and would not trigger with certain Jump Over skill variations. It also could not be canceled after a leap, even when no damage was dealt.

Don't forget to update your game!

Hello Heroes!

A new patch is available for The Last Spell, fixing two bugs!

BUGFIX

• Fixed an issue where poison effet of Unique weapons didn't scale, they are now considered as level 5 weapons

• Fixed an issue where the Material Instability perk didn’t count all attacks, like dodged ones, to trigger the Burst skill.

Don't forget to update your game!

Hello Heroes!

Today, we have a very special announcement (and no patch!).

Yesterday, we released our newest game, Dead in Antares, a survival/management RPG set in space!

Please take a look at the launch trailer:

Dead in Antares was made by a part of the original team of The Last Spell, so you may find this "big mix of genres"+"intertwined systems"+"tactical combat" that you loved so much in The Last Spell:

Some of the cool features that are in Dead in Antares:

• Gorgeous hand-drawn 2D art, made by humans, for humans

• A mysterious planet to explore and study

• 2 factions to interact with, and their intricate backstories

• Survival and resource management at its best

• Deep story with tough choices, a home to save, an endless conflict to put an end to, and more!

• Up to 20 work stations to manage and more than 130 upgrades to craft!

• Full RPG progression system, with traits, levels, skills… The whole package!

• 10 characters to manage, each with unique traits

• Build the relationships between your characters! Every pair of main character has its own interactions.

• Tactical turn-based combat with over 60 battle skills to acquire

• Unleash their full potential with the brand-new power surge, ultimate skills that will turn the tide in combat

• 4 levels of difficulty so there’s a challenge for everyone (and of course, a "True Captain" mode for the most hardened players!)

• Hours of story content, with 5 different endings

Dead in Antares is currently 15% off so you definitely do not want to miss it!

We hope you'll like our new little baby!

Hello Warriors!

Yesterday, we released patch 1.3.32.6, but unfortunately, one of the fixes introduced a very bad issue where players would have their save broken.

Thankfully, we reverted the fix, managed to repair the saves of players, and now we're finally able to release the fix without breaking the saves! (we're very sorry again)

• Fixed an issue where Manaflower Petal Storm Skill could kill the caster when you have unlocked Extended Reach Epiphanie.

• Fixed an issue where Cetusia’s unique offhand skill could kill the caster depending on the skill’s target.

• Headburst Unique rifle has now -10% propagation damage like other rifles

• Fixed an issue where Allied Soulbounds were mistakenly counted as enemies in your Haven in the HolyGround perk conditions. The perk now also grants the correct damage bonus to the hero.

• Fixed an initialization issue on the epiphany tooltip which could cause a softlock

Don't forget to update your game!

UPDATE

Unfortunately, we discovered that one of our fixes in version 1.3.32.6 could corrupt your saves if you had unique weapons in your run. To limit the issue as quickly as possible, we have reverted to version 1.3.32.4 while we work on fixing it. If you are affected by this issue, please send us your save folder so we can check with you whether it’s possible to recover a backup of your save. Thank you for your understanding, and we are truly sorry for the inconvenience caused.

You can find your saves here :

%Appdata%/../LocalLow/Ishtar Games/The Last Spell/Save/Steam

Please send your files to support\Ishtar\games

Hello Warriors!

We have a new hotfix for this week, bringing more bugfix!

• Fixed an issue where Manaflower Petal Storm Skill could kill the caster when you have unlocked Extended Reach Epiphanie.

• Fixed an issue where Cetusia’s unique offhand skill could kill the caster depending on the skill’s target.

• Headburst Unique rifle now has -10% propagation damage like other rifles

• Fixed an issue where Allied Soulbounds were mistakenly counted as enemies in your Haven in the HolyGround perk conditions. The perk now also grants the correct damage bonus to the hero.

• Fixed an issue where poison effet of Unique weapons didn't scale, they are now considered as level 5 weapons

• Fixed an initialization issue on the epiphany tooltip which could cause a softlock

Don't forget to update your game!

Hello Heroes!

A new hotfix is available for The Last Spell, fixing more reported issues:

• Fixed an issue where portable items could be built infinitely by undoing immediately after construction.

• Fixed an issue where heroes available at the same level had inconsistent prices when the apocalypse modifier “Reduce Inn Heroes Level” was enabled.

• Fixed selling price being higher than the buying price when taking epiphanies with item cost reduction and shop uprades or Omen of Bargaining

• Fixed a bug where dodge value in the skill attack UI wasn't correct when a perk added an Inaccurate skill effect

• Fixed an issue where the dodge multiplier was not properly refreshed when hovering over an enemy while a skill was selected.

• Fixed a visual issue where an isolated enemy appeared as non-isolated in the skill preview after a propagation attack.

• Tooltips are now adaptive to prevent them from going off-screen horizontally at lower resolutions.

• Fixed tooltips of some perks using Damage instead of Perk Damage

• Fixed a tooltip issue, there was missing % in some perk descriptions

• Fixed an issue where "Elusive" Perk could softlock the game when it killed a "Boomer" or "Hopper" enemy under certain conditions

• Fixed an issue where a new god dialogue entry didn't show the right text

Don't forget to update your game!

Hello Heroes!

A new patch is out, fixing many reported issues!

• Fixed « Guard Practice » Perk not resetting at the end of a night.

• Fixed an issue where the “Human Clawer-Opener” perk did not apply damage to enemies stunned by the “Septic Shock” Perk.

• Fixed « Vicious Venom » Perk not activating at the correct times.

• Fixed Corpse Piles sometimes offering level 6 items.

• Fixed Wall upgrade price not being reduced by the Arrowslit Epiphany.

• Fixed a bug where the next night after their summon, allied units were counted as enemies to kill (you were not able to end the night, unless going to the main menu and reloading the game)

• Fixed « Bloodcoated » Unique Weapon Perk counter resetting to 4 needed hits instead of 5 after killing a unit.

• Fixed an issue where the game softocked when Nessie's tail get attacked by "Elusive" Perk during the Nessie spawn.

• Fixed an issue where quests would not be fulfilled even when the conditions were met.

Don't forget to update your game!

Hello Heroes!

A new patch is out, fixing softlock issues, and more!

BUGFIX

• Fixed an issue where a softlock could occur when quitting and reloading a game, and have enemies die from poison applied by a hero with the "Blood Thirst" Perk.

• Fixed an issue where a softlock could occur when a gravely wounded hero with an active "Back Protection" Perk regained health.

• Fixed an issue where heroes with "Throw Potion" Perk or "Runic Gift" Perk in their perk tree reduced consumable and trinket slots each time after returning to the main menu. (Unfortunately, the fix will not apply to heroes that already lost their slots)

• Fixed the first condition of Weapon Eposes continually increasing once it has been completed.

• Fixed "Starter Epiphanies IV", "Production Epiphanies" and "Defense Epiphanies" Eposes not being counted as completed after beating the requested night.

• Fixed a localization issue where some menus did not refresh properly when changing the language.

Don't forget to update your game!

Hello Heroes!

This is it! The FINAL DLC for The Last Spell, Tales of Torment, is finally available!

First and foremost, please take a look at the launch trailer for the game:

LAUNCH TRAILER

Tales of Torment Features

Tales of Torment is the final DLC for The Last Spell, and brings brutal new challenges, bold and rewarding new objectives, and the most powerful new items and perks ever added to the game, as you meet a mysterious new god seeking to reclaim his lost memories.

In this DLC, you will earn Memories by achieving Ordeals and Divergences, and those Memories will allow you to access the all powerful Epiphanies, the most powerful items ever added to the game.

Ordeals: New Objectives

During each night, you will be challenged with additional objectives called Ordeals. Complete up to 3 of them to earn precious Memories and unlock rewards.

Divergences: Deadly Challenges

Every night, a Divergence will reshape the fights and twist the upcoming night with brutal new modifiers.

Stronger enemies? More elites? Heroes with maluses? You name it!

Can you take up the challenge and push your skills (and your sanity) to the edge?

Epiphanies: The most powerful items added to the game

Run by a strange and ominous new being, the Altar grants permanent bonuses known as Epiphanies in exchange of Memories: unique weapons, armors, trinkets, unique perks , and more, that will reshape your playstyle to slaughter even more of those damned monsters.

And as usual, we have a free major update for ALL players of The Last Spell!

Free Update: New Apocalypses + New Ballistae Upgrades + LOTS of balancing

New Apocalypses!

New Ballistae Upgrades!

And a LOT of balancing!

We did a full dedicated blogpost to the changelog of this 1.3 Major Update, please head here to read here:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1105670/partnerevents/edit/514107014358499556

This is the FINAL DLC for The Last Spell, and we hope you'll enjoy it. We put all of our hearts into this DLC, and it's a very emotional time for us, as we're saying goodbye to a project that changed our lives, and that is loved by so many people.

We'll be moving to new projects (but hushh). May we meet again.

Take care, Heroes <3

Hello Heroes,

today's the day! The FINAL Major update (bringing the final DLC) for The Last Spell is finally available! This final major update brings new apocalypses, a ton of balancing, a full rework of the ballistae, and so much more!

We also have some AMAZING news: The Last Spell is now officially VERIFIED on Steam Deck!

But we KNOW what you're waiting for, the one thing some of you will read before even launching the game: the BIG changelog for this new version!!

Watch the Tales of Torment DLC Trailer

NEW APOCS 

We have added 4 new Apocalypse modifiers, bringing the maximum possible Apoc level to 100. We of course don’t recommend using all of them at once, but this should let you tailor the difficulty of the game even more, especially since Tales of Torment encourages you to play with apocs on. Here are the new modifiers: 

CORPSE PILES VS PANIC 

One issue that we wanted to address for a long time is that the rewards coming from corpse piles were worth much more than what people could get from achieving an A or S rank night, which incited players to play counter-intuitively and let enemies come into the Haven. We have rebalanced both mechanics so that both are viable and equal strategies. 

DEFENSES 

For a while now, we have felt that defense building was a bit too one-dimensional. To address this, we have made two major changes: 

First, the Ballista now has 3 different upgrades instead of just one. Each upgrade has its own unique strengths: the mounted ballista has vision and extended range, the heavy ballista has much higher damage and armor piercing, while the split ballista can hit multiple targets at once. With this change, defending your base will not just be spamming the same fully upgraded ballistas everywhere: you will have to think about your needs, and which type of ballista fits them best. 

Second, all defenses now have global upgrades that improve their damage or effect. This will let them scale better in the late game. 

REWORKED SKILLS 

Two weapon skills have been reworked for balance purposes: 

The second skill of the Longbow has been replaced by a new skill, Acid Shot, which is a debuff skill with multi-hit. It can be very strong against beefy targets. 

Since we don’t like to throw things away entirely, Watchout, the old skill from the Longbow, is now available to Heroes sitting inside a Watchtower. 

The main skill of the Rifle has been reworked and renamed into Shrapnel Shot. It now has 1 Propagation Bounce, and still has very high damage. 

And now, the full changelog!

GENERAL 

Apocalypse 

Added 4 new modifiers : 

• Hastened Enemy Scaling 

• Reduced Inn Heroes Level 

• Worse Hero Traits 

• Super Elite Affixes 

End of Night 

• Ending a night at rank S now grants two items instead of one. One of them is guaranteed to be a weapon. 

• Ending a night at rank B now also grants an item 

• Rescaled the average rarity and level of items when ending a night at rank S or A: in the first nights, their level should be higher than before. In the late nights, their rarity should be better than before. 

Other 

• Propagation Damage: Minimum reduced from 75% to 60% 

• Enemies are now capped at 95% Resistance instead of 100% 

• Increased minimum of multiple damage stats from 0% to 5% 

WEAPONS 

Physical weapons 

Sword 

Blade Rush (Skill 3): 

• Cost: 2 AP, 2 Mana > 1 AP, 3 Mana 

Ranged Weapons 

Longbow 

Watchout (Skill 2) has been replaced by a new skill, Acid Shot:

• Cost : 1 AP 

• 2 Uses per Turn 

• Single Target 

• 5-12 Range 

• Multi-Hit x3 

• Applies : -20% Dodge, -200 Armor 

Rifle 

Stat malus changed from –1 Move Points to –10% Propagation Damage. 

Rifle Shot (Skill 1): 

• Renamed to “Shrapnel Shot” 

• Added Propagation x1 

Magic Weapons 

Tome of Magic 

Base Damage at level 0: 70-111 -> 76-126 

Weakening Touch (Skill 2): 

• Propagation Bounces: 6 > 8 

Fireball (Skill 3): 

• DMG x1.1 (77-122) > DMG x1.2 (91-151) 

Lightning Strike (Skill 4): 

• DMG x1.3 (91-144) > DMG x1.4 (106-176) 

• Propagation Bounces: 9 > 10 

Other Items 

Fixed some levels of Teleportation Scroll having the exact same effects as the previous level by rescaling use gains between levels. 

BUILDINGS 

Seer 

• Repel Mist now has 2 uses per Production phase instead of 1 

Goldmine 

• Base Cost: 60 -> 50 Gold 

• Upgrade “Production +” cost: 60 -> 75 Gold 

• “Production +” upgraded effect: 40 -> 50 Gold produced 

Scavenger Camp 

• Base Cost: 60 -> 50 Gold 

• Base production: 40 -> 50 Materials 

• Upgrade “Production +” cost: 60 -> 75 Gold 

• “Production +” upgraded effect: 60 -> 100 Materials produced 

Temple 

• “Blessing” worker cost: 2 -> 1 workers 

• “Blessing” effect: +24 -> +20 Health 

• Upgrade “Blessing +” cost: 80 -> 50 Gold 

• “Blessing” upgraded effect: +32 -> +35 Health 

Ruins 

• Increased the resource yields of all ruins : 

1-Tile ruin : 

• Gold Focus : 14 Gold & 13 Materials > 18 Gold & 16 Materials 

• Material Focus : 4 Gold & 40 Materials > 5 Gold & 50 Materials 

2-Tile ruin : 

• Gold Focus : 32 Gold & 28 Materials > 38 Gold & 32 Materials 

• Material Focus : 9 Gold & 90 Materials > 10 Gold & 120 Materials 

3-Tile ruin : 

• Gold Focus : 54 Gold & 45 Materials > 60 Gold & 48 Materials 

• Material Focus : 15 Gold & 162 Materials > 15 Gold & 210 Materials 

4-Tile ruin : 

• Gold Focus : 80 Gold & 68 Materials > 84 Gold & 64 Materials 

• Material Focus : 24 Gold & 240 Materials > 20 Gold & 320 Materials

Corpses 

• Reduced the average level and rarity of items obtained through corpse scavenging (except Elite Corpse Piles). 

• Rebalanced the resources obtained through corpse scavenging: 

• Small Corpse Pile (Gold Focus): +16 Gold > +15 Gold 

• Small Corpse Pile (Material Focus): +30 Materials > +32 Materials 

• Medium Corpse Pile (Resource Focus): +18 Gold & +32 Materials > +15 Gold & +48 Materials 

• Large Corpse Pile (Resource Focus): +72 Gold & +128 Materials > +45 Gold & +192 Materials 

• Elite Corpse Pile: +22 Gold & +38 Materials > +15 Gold & +48 Materials 

DEFENSES 

Walls 

• Reduced panic generated by ~50% 

Ballistae 

• Added two new ballista variants, Heavy Ballista and Split Ballista, which are upgrades of the regular Ballista, similar to how the Mounted Ballista works. 

• Added a global upgrade to Ballistas that increases the damage of all Ballistas : 

• Level 1: +0% > +25% Damage, costs 200 Materials 

• Level 2: +25% > +50% Damage, costs 400 Materials 

• Removed the “Seasoned Operator” upgrade (the Seasoned Operator Favor now unlocks global defense upgrades instead). 

Mounted Ballista 

• Damage : 140-170 > 120-140 

• Range : 8 > 10 

Heavy Ballista 

• Damage : 220-280 

• Range : 8 

• Attack has “Armor Piercing” 

Split Ballista 

• Damage : 80-120 

• Range : 8 

• Attacks 3 targets per turn 

Traps 

Slow Trap: 

• Material Cost: 7 > 6 

• Added a global upgrade to Slow Traps that increases the debuff from 2 to 3 Move Points 

Stun Trap: 

• Material Cost: 10 > 8 

• Added a global upgrade to Stun Traps that increases the number of uses from 1 to 2 

Damage Trap: 

• Material Cost: 13 > 12 

• Added a global upgrade to Damage Traps that increases damage from 80-130 to 120-195 

Catapults 

• Added a global upgrade to Catapults that increases the damage of all Catapults : 

• Level 1: +0% > +25% Damage, costs 200 Materials 

• Level 2: +25% > +50% Damage, costs 400 Materials 

Watchtower 

• Now grants +2 Skill Range to Heroes inside a watchtower 

• Now grants the skill Watchout to Heroes inside a Watchtower 

Poison Seeds 

• Skill range: 0-3 -> 0-5 

PERKS 

Dwarf Perks 

Jolly Drinker 

• Now also grants +30% Healing Received 

Hard as Rock 

• Block buff duration increased from 1 to 2 turns 

Against the Wall 

• Bonus damage: 10% + 2 per level -> 12% + 3 per level 

Stoneheart Shield 

• Block gained : 6 -> 10 

• Maximum block bonus : 30 -> 40 

• Now also grants +40 to Maximum Block 

Aggressiveness 

• Armor threshold: 15 -> 10 

Condensed Hate 

• Hits Needed: 8 -> 3 

Shower of Blows 

• Stat changes now cap after 10 consecutive hits  

• Damage bonus per hit: 5% -> 7% 

• Accuracy malus per hit: -4% -> -3% 

OTHERS

• The last favors are now revealed when there are only 10 favors left, helping players track their final objectives.

Tales of Torment DLC

 Tales of Torment is the third and final DLC, now available!

Tales of Torment adds new challenges, bold and new rewarding new objectives, and powerful items and perks!

• Addition of the Altar, a new building granting permanent bonuses known as Epiphanies: unique weapons, armors, trinkets, unique perks, and more.

• Exchange Memories for Epiphanies

• Addition of Ordeals, additional objectives that you will be invited to complete each night to gain Memories

• Addition of Epiphanies, brutal new modifiers that will grant you Memories

• Addition of a new God, inviting you to complete Eposes, tasks similar to the Favors in the main game, to unlock even more Epiphanies

And that's all!

Take care, Heroes <3 

Hello Heroes,

it's a very small blogpost today, but we've just launched the steam page for the final DLC of The Last Spell!

This DLC will add brand-new features to the game, that will add new challenges, bold and rewarding new objectives, and let you access to the most powerful new items and perks ever added to the game, as you meet a mysterious new god seeking to reclaim his lost memories.

• Access the Altar, a new building that grants permanent bonuses known as Epiphanies, that you can get for a few precious Memories.

• During each night, you will be challenged with additional objectives called Ordeals. Complete up to 3 of them to earn precious Memories and unlock rewards.

• Every night, a Divergence will reshape the fights and twist the upcoming night with brutal new modifier that will also earn you precious Memories.

• Meet a new God by completing up to 50 Eposes, tasks similar to the Favors in the main game, and unlock even more Epiphanies. Nearly 100 Epiphanies await to fully unleash your most ruthless builds.

This final DLC will bring bloody new tools of savagery for newcomers and brutal new challenges for hardened players.

And don't forget that the DLC will be released on February 5th, so don't forget to add the DLC to your wishlist to be among the first players to play it when it finally comes out!

Take care! <3

Hello Heroes!

A new year is upon us, and so is the FINAL DLC of The Last Spell, called “Tales of Torment”. This shall be our final blogpost teasing the content of the DLC 😊

As for us, this is the final lap before the end. We’ve JUST closed the last beta for the DLC yesterday. We had a LOT of feedback from players, so those last few weeks will be spent analyzing the results and balancing the DLC, as well as putting the last touches on it.

Release date of Tales of Torment

We’re VERY happy to announce that Tales of Torment will be released VERY soon: the DLC will be available on February 5th 2026! So, only a few weeks to wait until the release!

But let’s not get too emotional (yet), for we still have a blogpost (and a DLC) to finish 😊 And once again, I’ll let Victor talk about it! Today, we’re focusing on the new God and the Eposes, introduced in Tales of Torment.

Introducing Eposes

Hello! Today, I’ll be talking mainly about what we call Eposes. Once again, here’s the diagram of the new systems to show you what I’ll be talking about:

To summarize everything : Divergences and Ordeals are in-run challenges that allow you to gain Memories, which are used to complete Epiphanies. Each epiphany grants you a unique bonus until the end of the run. As for Eposes, they unlock new Epiphanies between your runs.

But before I talk about Eposes, I will be talking about who gives them to you, namely “Weltschmerz”.

Meet Weltschmerz

Players owning the DLC will have access to a new screen that has similarities to the Oraculum. A new, mysterious character will greet them, and later introduce themselves as “Weltschmerz” (yes, we do love our unpronounceable german words).

Meet this enigmatic traveler, a disillusioned master whose power resonates all the way to the Havens through his Altar. While Weltschmerz's past is shrouded in mystery, his offer is clear: help him relive the glory of his Eposes, and he will reward you with forgotten powers, in the form of new Epiphanies. He is a warrior looking for an equal. Dive into his memories, unlock his ancient teachings, and forge your own path within your story.

Weltschmerz, like the goddesses, proposes a deal: re-enact his Eposes, and he will share with you his teachings from times immemorial, in the form of new epiphanies.

Eposes

Eposes are the equivalent to Favors in the Oraculum. Like Freude’s Favors, they require you to achieve specific deeds.

The main differences from Favors are :

• They specifically unlock Epiphanies, and nothing else

• They all require a certain level of apocalypse

Other than this, their requirements vary greatly, but have generally been designed as little challenges for the players. Here are a few examples (as usual, even though we are nearing the end of development, keep in mind that all values are still subject to change):

For players telling themselves, “I’m already struggling on the vanilla game, there is no way I will be able to complete any of the Eposes if they require you to play in Apocalypse!”, fret not! Eposes are designed to introduce players to Apocalypse modifiers, thus the vast majority of Eposes only require very low apocalypse levels, and do not require you to win a run. Here are a few examples:

Still, for players looking for a challenge or a reason to try out the new features from the DLC, there are a few Eposes than are more challenging:

These have conditions that have to be completed in a single run, all together, which makes it a true “challenge run”.

In total, there are 54 Eposes to complete just in this DLC. If you own all DLCs of The Last Spell, the number of Eposes goes up to 66, as a few Eposes will be exclusive to Dwarves of Runenberg and Elves of Amberwald.

Quickstart

Lastly, one mechanic we have added following player feedback is the “Quickstart” option for the DLC. Some Eposes seemed a bit grindy for players who had already played a lot of the base game. However, we couldn’t just make all the Eposes super quick to unlock, as that would make the DLC experience way too fast on fresh saves, and overlap with the normal progression of the game.

So, here’s how the quickstart works: after buying the DLC, if you load up a save that was last played without the DLC, and meeting Weltschmerz for the first time, you will be shown a “Quickstart” popup.

If you accept, some Eposes will be completed or advanced according to your base game meta progression. Some will progress even if you haven’t played yet in apoc, so you don’t have to do everything in apoc again.

If you want the “true” experience of the DLC, you can of course refuse the quickstart.

A few more Epiphanies

Like in every blogpost since we revealed Epiphanies, I’ll be showing you a few more Epiphanies:

Ghastly Energy

Ghastly Energy is an Epiphany that grants a perk with the same name to all of your Heroes. It reduces the mana cost of their skills depending on their Resistance Reduction attribute.

Here, for example, we have a Hero with 46% Resistance Reduction, which reduces the cost of Fireball from 4 to 3 and the cost of Lightning Strike from 6 to 4. This Epiphany can be extremely useful if you are planning to use very mana-intensive weapons in your run, like the Tome of Magic.

Bonepull

Bonepull is the Unique version of the Spear. Like all unique weapons, it comes with a special perk, in this case “Gutting”.

After hitting a certain number of enemies in a single turn, your “Impale” skill –the first one- will be upgraded with bonus AoE. The first upgrade adds 6 tiles, 3 on each side, and the second upgrade 6 additional ones, 3 on each side once again. You can see the fully upgraded version in the tooltip right here:

The bonus is reset at the end of each turn, but by carefully planning which skills to use in what order, you should be able to use the upgraded skill nearly every turn. Here’s what it looks like in action:

Broken Bell

Broken Bell is an Epiphany that grants a unique Trinket. This Trinket grants a very powerful skill called “Curse Wish”. It applies very powerful alterations to 2 targets, and these last for the entire night. As one of the alterations is Contagion, if you use the skill in the right way, you can propagate these alterations to a lot more enemies. This can be a very powerful item if one of your Heroes is running a debuff or poison build.

And here’s the skill in action:

As a reminder, there will be nearly a hundred epiphanies to uncover in Tales of Torment. As this is the last blogpost on the subject before release, these are the last ones we will tease before then. Thank you once again for reading through this blogpost and see you then!

And this is it for this final blogpost of teasing before the release of the DLC. In three weeks (!) you’ll finally be able to play this last DLC for our little game. We hope you’ll enjoy playing it as much as we did making it.

Take care, Heroes! <3

Hello Heroes!

This year is finally coming to an end! This blogpost will be a little special as it's not a "DLC blogpost" like usual, but we still have one more blogpost dedicated to the DLC coming up in January 😉 So this time, we wanted to do a very special "Holidays" blogpost!

For The Last Blogpost (before 2026), we have a lot of things to discuss with you, so let’s go!

Meet the team of Tales of Torment!

Some of you may know us from the Discord server (and if you haven’t already, join our awesome community), but we thought the holidays would be a cool time to know more about the people who’ve been working hard on the DLCs of the game 😉 So, everyone working on the DLCs of The Last Spell had a little something to share with you all!

Manon Fontaine, Producer:

My job is a bit of a mix between a happiness manager and a living reminder. I make sure everyone is in the right mindset to do their work: prioritizing certain tasks so we can make a trailer for marketing, postponing other parts because the game designers aren’t sure yet (to avoid changing everything fifteen times), and regularly reminding everyone about small details we had put aside. Basically, my goal is to offer the team a space where they can create calmly, without having to think about all of that. It’s not always easy, it’s real teamwork, with constant adjustments. I wasn’t there for the release of DLC 2 because I was busy creating a little baby, so I’m really excited to be part of the release of DLC 3! And during the holidays, between two snails (yes, I’m French…), I’ll probably finally finish Cult of the Lamb. Honestly, it’s a bit like my job when I think about it…

Victor Ternisien, Game Designer:

Hello! Victor here. You may remember me from the recent blogposts. I'm one of the Game Designers on the team, and I tend to focus a bit more on the balancing & numbers side of the game. I am currently hard at work trying to balance out all of the things we are adding in the new DLC, which represents... a LOT, given the vast amount of Epiphanies we have added. Beta testers have given us ample feedback, and the challenge is now to improve as many things as possible, while staying within the development schedule and keeping the content accessible to newer players.

During the winter break, I plan on playing a bit of Victoria 3's newest DLC, and probably a lot of boardgames with friends and family - my favorite at the moment being "Earth", which I wholeheartedly recommend if you are a seasoned boardgame player.

Robin Fau, Game Designer

Hello! My name is Robin, aka Biggs, and I’m in charge of the GD team for the DLCs of The Last Spell. Thanks to the team, we were able to put in place the different features of this DLC (and the previous ones, of course)… And how cool was it to work on that!

I’m especially proud of having been able to experiment so much on this DLC and make it a bit more roguelike and unpredictable, while respecting the philosophy of the game.

Offering systems like divergences and Ordeals was something complicated to put in place, but it turned out to be very fun to allow players to show their capacity to adapt and also try new strategies. And it’s all connected by the Epiphanies,  that really let you create your fantasy of overpowered hero saving what’s left of the world!

And outside the systemic design, I also work on the whole narrative parts and the localization of the DLCs. (Nothing better than a dwarf yelling on an elf!)

During the holidays, I’ll probably play Sulfur (Hello Simon!), and probably find a hack & slash that I’ll play way too much during the holidays… (Let’s face it, we all know it’s going to be Path of Exile 2).

Morgane Lainard, Game Designer

Hi there I'm Morgane, one of the game designers on the team. I focus on the user experience. I'm making sure that, when we are adding new content, all players, regardless of experience or play type, have the information needed to understand the new systems and that this info is delivered in an efficient manner for smooth and efficient decision making without sacrificing challenge or fun.

Which is quite the challenge with a game like The Last Spell!

By collecting and compiling feedback from the Discord and from the beta surveys, we could see that you all have very different play styles and wants and needs from the game. While making this DLC that affects a lot of game systems, it's been a fun juggling act for us to confront that feedback with our creative vision, while taking into consideration the experience of new and very experienced players alike.

I also try to improve usability wherever possible within our dev constraints and budget.

During the holidays, I will live my best dwarven life in the last DLC of Return to the Moria and prepare to GM the Tainted Grail tabletop RPG.

Simon Hembert, Programmer

This DLC is really different from its predecessors. As a programmer, I spent quite some time thinking about the architectures of the new features and create their foundations in the code. During the last few weeks, I’ve been working on improving the code and improving a million little things after the feedback we got during the previous betas.

More generally, on The Last Spell and our other games, a big part of my work is about integrating the UIs because we have a LOOOT of UIs.

During the holidays, I’ll probably keep playing Sulfur, an extract shooter (I blame my coworker Robin for introducing me to the game) and also Rocket League because I’m addicted to it 😊

Frederic Durey, Programmer

Hi, I'm Frederic and one of the programmers of the DLCs! In this DLC I mainly worked on epiphanies, it was fun to implement different effects.

I hope that with the content this dlc brings, it'll please a lot of players and that they will have fun in trying to play differently than they usually do.

Regarding the holidays, i think I'll play "And roger" and maybe finish "Coffee talk episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly". And if I find the time, start a chaos dwarves campaign in Total War Warhammer 3".

Adrien Feugere, Artist

Hi, I’m Adrien, I’m the main artist on the DLCs of The Last Spell! I also was in charge of the animations for the base game, so I’ve been working on the game for quite some time now!

I love working on the skills of the game, but I got to work on some of my favourite ones in this DLC! I’m very proud of the identity of the skills I was able to give to some of the weapons.

As a small holiday present, here are some animations I worked on for the epiphanies of this DLC

Bruno Laverny, Comms

And it’s my turn! I’ve been the main voice of Ishtar Games for quite some time now (almost 9 years!). I’m kind of multitask as I handle social media, community management, marketing, strategy, support… On this DLC specifically, I worked on organizing the beta sessions, oversaw the blogposts, pretty much everything related to the steam pages!

I had my birthday just a few days ago, so I know I’ll probably spend way too much time on JRPGs, this year I’ll play Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army, and I’ll take way too many pictures of my guinea pigs and my cat.

A Steamdeck update is coming!

We’re aware that a lot of Steamdeck users had some feedback regarding The Last Spell on the deck. We know this one has been a long time coming, but we can officially say that an official Steamdeck support is coming to The Last Spell next month!

So, if you’re getting a steamdeck under the tree this year, you’re in for a very good time! (on top of all the amazing games verified on steamdeck!).

Modding

As you may remember, we included modding in our roadmap that we had released last year. Modding is something that we REALLY wanted to do for a LONG time, but with ambitious DLCs and not infinite resources, that’s something we haven’t been able to properly do.

Unfortunately, we had to make the decision to cut our ambitions on modding for The Last Spell, at least for the time being.

That being said, we do have a little thing you’ll be able to mod before the release of the DLC, so please look forward to it!

Some fun numbers

As you may remember, in May 2024 we added some analytics to the game to understand analyze players’ behaviors so we can have more data about the balancing of the game, for instance.

For the first time, here are some fun numbers that we collected during that time:

• Players launched more than 1 million runs

• Most played maps: Lakeburg, Gildenberg, and then Elderlicht

We also have the most used perks:

• Mana Growth for tier 1

• Magic Fuel for tier 2

• Runic Gift for tier 3

• Critical Master for tier 4

• Big Game Hunter for tier 5

Finally, we can talk about skills!

• The most used skill is Centipedes (Druidic Staff) with over 4 million (!) uses

• The deadliest skill is Shred (Axe) that killed over 2 million enemies

Happy Holidays!

And with that final note this blogpost comes to an end!

Now, we’re going to take a well deserved rest, sleep and eat way too much.

We can’t wait to launch Tales of Torment, coming early 2026! 😊  

Hello Heroes!

We hope you're doing okay. We're getting closer to the release of Tales of Torment DLC (like VERY SOON, and we will announce the release date BEFORE the holidays!), and next month, we're going to have the FINAL Beta of this DLC.

As you may know, we've done several closed betas prior to that one, with a small group of players who helped us very much in fine-tuning the new systems of the new DLC, and we can never thank them enough for giving us so many valuable feedback!

As the release of Tales of Torment is soon upon us, we want to do one last closed Beta.

IMPORTANT

The goal of this beta is :

• To collect feedback regarding the balancing of the DLC

• And to chase all the bugs who managed to get past our devs

This Beta will take place from January 5th to January 12th, but all selected players will receive an invitation before December 23rd.

As this will be a private Beta, you will be required to sign an NDA and you won't be able to share it online with other players outside the beta.

Requirements: 

• Be on our discord server

• Own The Last Spell on Steam

Submit your participation here: https://forms.gle/RngqxpusddaCkscu8

Take care! <3

Hello everyone!

Phew, third blogpost already about the DLC! We’re getting closer to the release (early 2026!) and we’re making great progress on it.

This month, we organized a private beta with some selected members of our community, and that beta allowed us to improve some of the new systems (more on that in the blogpost!). We want to thank our amazing beta players for their involvement and their many comments and feedback posts <3

And we’re VERY happy to finally announce the name of the DLC: The Last Spell: Tales of Torment!

Today, we’re going to talk about another new mechanic of the DLC: Ordeals! And once again, I’ll let Victor, game designer on The Last Spell, take over this blogpost!

Presenting Ordeals

Hello once again! I’m here to talk about Ordeals, the third new mechanic introduced in this DLC. If you recall the diagram from the last blogpost, here’s what I’m talking about:

So, what’s an ordeal ? Ordeals are short-term objectives that will appear during nights, and let you gain Memories if you complete their requirements. Here’s an example:

Ordeals are composed of:

• A main action: dealing damage, killing enemies, using skills... it requires the player to do the following action a given amount of times.

• One or two additional constraints: in this case, there are two. One is “Target has a Negative Alteration”, and the other is “Target is at full health”. This means that the player has to deal damage to enemies that have a negative alteration AND are at full health.

• A time limit: the player has to complete the Ordeal within the time limit. After that, the ordeal will disappear. The time limit generally ranges between 1 and 4 turns.

• A reward: how many memories the ordeal will grant if you complete it.

We have a multitude of actions and constraints. The general idea of Ordeals is to force the player to do something they would not naturally do, so that it is an added challenge. Here are a few examples:

There are also Ordeals that require you NOT to do something for a given amount of turns:

The System

Now that you know how an ordeal works and what it looks like, here’s a bit more about the system in its entirety, across a whole night.

Each night, the player has a “quota” of 3 ordeals to accomplish. If that amount is reached, a certain amount of Memories is awarded as a bonus, which we call the Covenant Bonus. After that, all current ordeals disappear, and no other ordeals can be completed for the night.

For the record, this is a recent change we have made after feedback from our beta testers. Before, we had no limit on the amount of Ordeals players could complete during the night. This meant that, in order to maximize the Memories you obtained, you had to try and complete every single Ordeal that showed up. Because of this, Ordeals quickly turned into frustrating chores for our players.

With the Covenant system, players just have to find 3 ordeals they want to complete every night, and can thus ignore the ones they dislike or find too difficult to achieve in their current situation. Generally speaking, during a night, 6 to 8 ordeals will show up, which means you have to complete -at best- 50% of them.

Now, in terms of UI, here’s where the ordeals will show up during the night:

To recapitulate our intentions: Ordeals are meant to break the repetitiveness you can sometimes encounter during runs, where every turn feels like it plays the same. These short-term challenges should change that, while making you progress toward the next Epiphany. They are also meant as a counterpart to Divergences. While Divergences can be planned for and are visible ahead of the night, Ordeals rely more on surprise and quick adaptation during the night.

That’s it for Ordeals, but I’ll keep this blogpost going for just a bit longer to show you a few more epiphanies.

More epiphanies

As promised in the last Blogpost, here are a few more examples of Epiphanies that you will be able to activate in your runs. As a reminder, Epiphanies are bonuses that last for your entire run, and that can be obtained by collecting Memories (if you want more information on them, you can read the Blogpost here).

Less is more

Less is more is an epiphany that grants a perk to all heroes. It grants a LOT of experience gain, but this bonus is reduced for each Hero you have.

This is an epiphany you will want to take if you like to focus more on having a small number of very strong Heroes, instead of recruiting a lot of Heroes.

Extended Reach

Extended Reach is an Epiphany that increased the range of all melee skills, allowing them to reach one tile further.

Holy Ground

And here we have Holy Ground, which grants a special perk to all your Heroes: as long as no enemies have entered the Haven during a night, the Hero gets +20% Damage.

Corrupted Weapons

Lastly: in the previous Blogpost, I teased a screenshot of what looked like new versions of existing weapons. Today, I’ll be presenting you what they are: Unique Weapons.

For each weapon, the DLC adds an Epiphany that grants the player a unique version of this weapon. Each of them also has a name.

These weapons have 3 main advantages:

• Their damage automatically scales with the Hero’s level, so they will keep being relevant for the entire run

• Their damage is adaptative

• They have a unique new perk

They are Unique Items, so, like other Unique items, you can only equip one per Hero.

Here are two examples of what Unique Weapons look like:

Flayed

Flayed is the Unique version of the Tome of Magic. It comes with the unique perk “Eye of the Storm”, which will automatically cast Stray Lightning and random enemies every 3 Mana Spent.

Bloodtendon

Bloodtendon is the unique version of the Shortbow. It has upgraded AoEs on all of its skills.

And this is just an extract of the many Epiphanies you’ll be able to play with in this DLC. Once again, we’ll show you a few more in the next Blogpost. See you next time!

One Last word: our newest game, Dead in Antares, comes out on February 19th 2026

As you may know, the Ishtar Games studio is made of two teams currently:

• The “TLS” team, working on the DLCs and the post-release support of the game

• The “Dead in Antares” team, working on the new game of the “Dead in” series

And, we’re very happy to announce that Dead in Antares is releasing on February 19th 2025!

(And don’t worry, we’ll have a release date for Tales of Torment DLC soon, and it’s coming out sooner than you may think).

The “Dead in” series and The Last Spell share a lot of the same DNA (complex, hard games with RPG elements), so if you liked The Last Spell, there’s a high chance you might find a lot to love in Dead in Antares! 😉

There’s a free demo for Dead in Antares, so feel free to try it yourself!

Take care, heroes! <3

Hello Warriors! 

Halloween is nearly upon us, and until next week, The Last Spell AND its DLCs are on sale, so that could give you an idea of screaming when losing AGAIN against Cetusia. 

Last time, we showed you one of the new features of the upcoming DLC, the Divergences. That brought a LOT of... passionate comments from players! We definitely read them all, and we understand that didn’t fully explain the core loop of the DLC, and how each system works with each other. 

This is why before going deeper into the Epiphanies, we will present to you the Altar, and how all the new systems work with each other! 

Like the last time, I will let Victor, game designer on The Last Spell, take over this blogpost! 

The Altar 

Hello! Before presenting the true subject of this blogpost – Epiphanies – I will be presenting the Altar, which is a new building that will appear in any runs you launch if you have the DLC. It grants the player access to a new interface that centralizes most of the new features from the DLC. 

The Altar has two tabs: one of them is the Divergence tab, which we talked about in the last Blogpost, and the other is the Epiphanies tab. 

Epiphanies are a new mechanic we are introducing with this DLC. They are bonuses that last for the whole run and let the player specialize their run. To activate an Epiphany, the player must choose that Epiphany and then complete it by gaining Memories and filling the Memory gauge. Once an Epiphany is completed, the player can choose another one. 

Epiphanies can have various effects: 

• Give a very powerful item 

• Grant a perk to all Heroes 

• Grant a global passive effect 

These last for the entire run. 

Now that you know about Divergences and Epiphanies, we can show you how the 4 new mechanics of the DLC will mesh together. Here’s a simple diagram of the new mechanics: 

Epiphanies 

There are a total of 100+ Epiphanies in the DLC. At the start, the player has access to 25 of them, and the rest can be unlocked by playing the DLC. 

Our objective with Epiphanies is to make global bonuses that have an impact on your entire run, and shape how you build your haven, your heroes, or how you play the nights. Think of it as something that can create “builds” not just for your Heroes, but for your entire Haven. Different Epiphanies will affect different aspects of the game: Heroes, Economy, Defenses... and will generally reward you for committing to a certain playstyle. 

When starting a run, a given number of Epiphanies are chosen at random to constitute the Epiphany pool for this run. This lets players adapt and plan their run from the start, and makes it so that you won’t have to go for the same Epiphanies every run. For example, if you start a run and see multiple Epiphanies that affect Defenses in the Altar, you may want to focus more on building defenses during this run. 

As we don't have Icons at this stage of development, we use the names of the Epiphanies for now. Some of them give a good idea of what their effect could be.

Epiphanies are separated into 3 tiers with different Memory values: these represent how many Memories you have to accumulate to complete the Epiphany. After completing an Epiphany, the cost of all other Epiphanies is increased for the remainder of the run. This means that the first Epiphanies you complete are cheaper than the rest, so be careful about what you want to complete first, as some have an effect that is more interesting to get early. In a single run, players should be able to complete at least 3-4 Epiphanies, but you can go higher by playing on longer maps, completing as many Divergences as possible, or just taking the Epiphanies that cost less. 

Next, here are various examples of Epiphanies that will be available in the DLC: 

Examples 

Spiked Walls:  

This Epiphany, as the name says, grants spikes to your walls, which will automatically damage nearby enemies during the night. Here’s how it looks in-game: 

If you take this Epiphany, you’ll probably want to build a lot of walls to maximize its effect. Maybe you can even think of a clever pattern in which to build your walls? 

Efficiency: 

This Epiphany focuses more on the economic aspect of the run. When you complete a night at rank S or rank A, you will gain more Gold and Materials. You will probably want to take this Epiphany early, in a run where you focus on keeping Panic low. 

Aello’s Head: 

This Epiphany grants an item called “Aello’s Head”. It’s a new kind of item called a Unique Item. Unique Items are, as the name says, unique: every Unique Item can only be obtained through a specific Epiphany. Moreover, a single Hero can only equip a single Unique Item at a time, so choose carefully. 

As usual, all values here are subject to change: damage, range, cost... may be higher in the final version.

Aello’s Head is one in a series of Unique Items inspired by the Bosses of The Last Spell. This one lets you use “Flying Assault” a skill of the Harpies from Gildenberg. Players following us on Discord or other social media may have already seen it as a sneak peak, but here’s the item in action: 

While most Epiphanies have a global effect, Unique items can only be equipped on one Hero at a time, so they will only affect one of your Heroes. This one grants a high mobility skill for cheap, which can be strong for a Hero that plays with momentum, or a build that generally lacks mobility. Since the skill uses Adaptative damage, you can use it to full effect on Heroes specialized in any kind of damage. 

Nighttime Cravings: 

Nighttime Cravings is an Epiphany that is inspired by the Ripper enemy, which can eat clawers to boost himself.  This Epiphany grants a special skill to all your Heroes, that lets them “eat” a Clawer every turn for just 1 Action Point, to regenerate health. 

 As the range is restricted to melee and it grants health, this Epiphany is best used with many Heroes that play in melee range and risk losing Health. 

That's it for today, but we'll keep revealing a bit more Epiphanies in the next Blogposts. I’d just like to tease one last type of Unique Item that will come in this DLC... 

What do you think these are, and what do you think they do? You’ll get the answer in a future blogpost. That’s it for me, as I’ll let Bruno conclude this blogpost. 

A closed beta! 

We’re getting closer to the release of the final DLC of The Last Spell. (yes, we’re not calling it The Last DLC, we know), and we would like to invite YOU to play an early version of this DLC for a limited time. 

We’re looking for ~20/25 players to try the new features of this DLC, and give us some feedback about them! 

To participate in this beta: 

• Join our Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/ishtargames

• Be part of the “Ishtar Betas” role 

• And once you have that role, fill the form you will find in the “ishtar betas announcement” channel!  

We’re very excited about this final DLC! Next time, we will talk about the Ordeals. 

Take care <3  

Hello!

We've known Lost Pilgrim Studio for nearly 10 years, since our early days for Dead in Vinland! And we couldn't be happier about their new release!

Vagrus: The Riven Realms is an award-winning, turn-based, open-world dark fantasy strategy-RPG set in a deeply immersive world shaped by over two decades of tabletop roleplaying. Developed by Lost Pilgrims, a team who built their own setting – the Riven Realms – through countless DnD-style campaigns, the game features over 2.5 million words of story-driven, lore-heavy, richly-branching narrative that captures the spirit of classic tabletop adventures. In the game, the player takes the role of a vagrus - a sort of a caravan leader who makes a living in a strange and dangerous dark fantasy world by leading a traveling company on all kinds of ventures.

Lost Pilgrims have just posted a huge announcement on their Steam development blog about releasing their second expansion of Vagrus – At the Heart of Ruin along with a Ruinous Supporter Pack – on Steam and various console platforms. This expansion offers a tight but multi-layered and dense region fraught with conflict and rich with opportunities. Vagri who decide to brave the forsaken paths of this broken realm will be challenged not only by new foes and villains, but also by the very nature one must traverse the mountainous terrain.

New Content and Features

• A fresh, dangerous region unfettered from Imperial dominance and brimming with peril

• A dark narrative adventure with several overarching stories as well as shorter adventures

• Deep quests with multiple outcomes and a plethora of personalities

• Many new opportunities and challenges for traders, mercenaries, and explorers

• A host of new enemies, be they crazed scavengers or creatures cursed beyond recognition

• A large cast of NPCs, some new and some old, who can be a part of your story

• New minor factions the likes of which few vagri have ever had the chance to befriend or fight against

• New obstacles, rewards, lore, and more of our signature visual art

So, if this sounds like something you may like, check out the main game and its expansion!

Hello Heroes,

we hope you're doing good! We're still working hard on DLC 3, and on future blogposts to tell you more about the new systems we have yet to introduce you to!

In the meantime, we have a small bugfix issue for the game today!

Security issue

We want to let you know that a security issue was recently found in some versions of the Unity Editor. In certain cases, it could have allowed unsafe file loading. Good news: the issue has been completely fixed. We’ve applied the official Unity updates to make sure our games stay safe and stable. There is no evidence that the issue was ever exploited, and no player data has been affected.

Bugfix

• Fixed a text formatting issue in the perk Feral Instinct tooltip

• Fixed an issue where potions could not be used when the "Condensed Hate" (Stone Medal perk) was active

• Fixed an issue where old save versions could have troubles to unlock Battle Ready Achievement

Don't forget to update your game!

Hello Heroes! 

We hope you’re doing okay <3 So, if you remember, last month we announced  that the third DLC of The Last Spell would be the final DLC for the game, and that the DLC would be available in early 2026. 

We’ve been working all summer on this DLC, and right now, we’re starting to have every system nicely implemented in the game. It’s all VERY WIP, as most of the systems don’t have any UIs yet, and there’s no balancing yet. But we’re happy with our direction so far, and we can’t wait for you to experience it! 

We also organized some closed betas that allowed us to refine the different systems (a HUGE thank you to our very special beta testers <3).  

Since this is the first blogpost dedicated to the final DLC, we want to talk to you more about how we came up with this new formula, and introduce you to one of the new systems of this DLC: Divergences! 

And now, I’m giving the floor to Victor, one of the Game Designers of the team!  

Please keep in mind that divergences are only ONE PART of the DLC, and we have more blogposts coming to tease you what's to come in this DLC!

A new formula 

In the last announcement, we clarified that this would be the last DLC for The Last Spell, and that it would be different from previous DLCs. So, you might be asking: why exactly, and in what way? 

After finishing Elves of Amberwald, we made a clear observation: it would be extremely difficult for us to make another “race + map + 3 weapons” DLC that would meet our standards in terms of quality. When we make new content for the game, we want it to be fun, interesting and refreshing. It’s not that we have no ideas for new maps, weapons or races, but they would either be too similar to some existing content, or cost way too much to develop. 

Instead, we decided to focus on something else entirely: game systems and mechanics. Now, what kind of new systems do we want? We decided on three main points: 

• The new systems should make runs more diverse and different from each other 

• The new systems should add short or long-term goals/challenges to create new motivations during runs 

• The new systems should be “optional”: players can ignore them during a run if they don’t want to use them, preserving the “vanilla” experience 

You can keep these points in mind for future blogposts, as all new systems respect them. Now that the scope of the DLC has been set, I’m here to introduce one of the new systems that will be part of it: Divergences. 

Introducing Divergences 

To make it simple, a Divergence is an optional challenge for the coming night. Divergences will appear every 2 to 3 days, at the start of the production phase, and will offer a choice between 3 options: 

\ 

• Standard Divergence: an effect that will make the coming night harder for the player. It’s the basic version of the Divergence. 

• Strong Divergence: a “hardcore” version of the Standard Divergence. It has the same effect, but boosted. In exchange, it grants more rewards. 

• Refuse: this option will keep the coming night unchanged but does not give any rewards. 

Divergences can have a wide variety of effects, like adding more enemies, boosting enemies, or even handicapping the Heroes. When a Divergence appears, its effect is chosen at random, so you will see different divergences every run, even if you play the same map over and over. I will tease a few of the possible effects later in the blogpost. 

The main objective of Divergences is to give players the opportunity to take a risk and increase the difficulty of the coming night – a frequent mechanic in roguelikes. But it also brings something else: the player can potentially plan the night more carefully, as divergences give a more precise idea of the challenges awaiting them. This is already something that exists using the seer, but Divergences really extend it. For example, if you see a Divergence that adds a lot of Accursed to the wave, you may want to equip one or two more Heroes with a magic weapon. 

The difficulty of Divergences scales with nights and maps, so a divergence on Elderlicht night 10 will probably have much stronger effects than a divergence on Lakeburg night 2. 

Here, the night 9 Divergence is much harder, but also grants better rewards. Would you take the risk? 

As a side note, you might be thinking “what the hell are Memories ?”. The answer to that will come in another blogpost. In the meantime, think of it as a resource you will most likely want to collect during runs, just like Materials or Gold. 

We are currently testing and tuning this new mechanic, with the help of our lovely beta testers, along with the rest of the new features in DLC3. Getting early feedback from players has helped us a lot and has already helped us make much needed improvements and adjustments. For example, following the first round of playtests, beta testers told us that they always got the same divergences and that the system lacked variety. We have since added a few more and tweaked their chances of appearing, which has made the feature much more enjoyable. 

Examples 

Before we end this blogpost, here are a few examples of Divergences you might encounter during your runs with the upcoming DLC. Keep in mind that all values you see are likely to change in the final version, as we are still doing a lot of testing, tweaking and balancing. 

\ 

And that’s it for today, I think we went through everything there is to know about Divergences. But stay tuned for future blogposts, as this is only one of the new systems we are introducing in DLC3. 

We hope you’ll enjoy this DLC as much as we did working on it!  

The Final DLC of The Last Spell will be released in early 2026! 

Future blogposts!

To tease you a bit of what's next to come, here are the upcoming blogposts for the DLC:

• Ordalies

• Epiphanies

• Eposes

Intriguing, don't you think?

Take care <3  

Hello Heroes, we hope you're doing okay!

Here, it's summer, and we're still working hard on DLC 3 of The Last Spell, and we're making great progress! Now that we have more visibility on what we still have left to do for this DLC, we want to give you an update on the release window, and the future of The Last Spell.

So, DLC 3 when??

As we mentioned several times before, DLC 3 is VERY different from the Elves and Dwarves DLC. We can't give you specific details yet, but we're aiming to add brand-new systems that will give exciting new challenges for all players!

While working on the Dwarves and Elves, we wanted to enrich the existing systems we had spent so much time building. This allowed us to bring in new content without changing too much of what you already enjoy :) (well, we DID rework the whole Apoc system)

However, for DLC 3, adding new systems and challenges (that affect the entire game) means we need to work on THE WHOLE content of the game (Yes, our designers are crazy, don't get one at home). This is a huge task, but a VERY exciting one.

Finally, we want this DLC to be great for players. (more on that later) The last thing we want is to release a rushed DLC, because that's not something we'd be proud of.

This is why DLC 3 will be released early 2026. This will give us the time we need to fine-tune everything, and make sure it's up to the standards that we're setting for this game and our players :)

We thank you for your patience <3

DLC 3... will be the final DLC of The Last Spell

We also want to take this opportunity to make an announcement about the future of The Last Spell. We started to work on the game in early 2019, more than 6 years ago. And, as we've kept on working on the game after its 1.0 release, our goal was to bring as much new content for players as possible AND as long as it made sense for us, creatively speaking.

Although we're very proud of the work we did on the races, we decided to take a different direction for DLC3, one that brings more challenges to players. We’ve been reading the many comments, feedback, and reviews, and we made the decision to offer something different than Elves and Dwarves for DLC 3. We hope our players will like this new approach!

We've also made the decision that this DLC would be the final DLC of The Last Spell. There are several reasons for that:

• The original plan was to make 5 races. However, after Dwarves and Elves, we realized that if we want players’ expectations to be met, new races would need to be made in a new game and not as DLCs.

• For example, we’re aware players have been asking us for new enemies and bosses into the game, but that is not possible as it would  have taken us a lot of resources because the base content of the game is very complex and high quality. And making new (and good!) content on top of a system that was not made to get new content requires a lot of work. 

• Making more DLCs for The Last Spell will end up being more and more costly everytime we want new ideas, because the game is not infinitely extensible, and we don’t want to produce content just for the sake of making new content. 

• We'll need people working on TLS to work on our future game (wink wink) next year.

This is why we took the decision of making DLC 3 the FINAL DLC of The Last Spell. This doesn't mean we will not release any more update after its release, but they will mostly be focused on bugfix and small balancing patches if there needs some.

We want to make it clear that even though this DLC will be very ambitious with a lot of work involved, it will be one that, we hope, will make our players proud of what we're doing. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for you, so thank you <3 We're definitely intending to go with a bang for this last DLC ;)

It's been such an honour to work on this amazing game, and we promise, this will be worth it.

Thank you for all the love and support <3

Hello Heroes,

we interrupt your summer to bring you a small-ish update for The Last Spell, AND an update for the apocalypse achievements!

Apocalypse Achievements

Apocalypse achievements now require the player to complete a map with a certain Apocalypse Level active, instead of a certain amount of modifiers. This is more similar to how it worked before, and should be less confusing to players

Localisation fix

• Fixed two translation errors in German in the Metashop entries related to starting the game with a helmet or a usable.

• Fixed a translation error in Ukrainian in the "How to Play" tab related to panic.

Bugfix

• Fixed a bug where the Perk Death Denial didn’t work when a hero was killed by the perk Boom

Hello Heroes!

We hope you're okay! Today, we have a small update about DLC 3 of The Last Spell, and a VOD to share with you all!

TactiCon 2025 - Few against Many: designing overwhelming tactical encounters

As you may have noticed, The Last Spell is part of the official Tacticon 2025 selection!

Tacticon is a premier Steam-based digital event organized by publishers Firesquid and Hooded Horse, for its fourth year, celebrating the best from the world of strategy, management, and simulation games from tomorrow until July 21. This year’s event is kicking off with another showcase hosted by Hooded Horse’s own Renee April, with cool trailers, reveals, and announcements revealed during the 60-minute broadcast.

Victor and Robin, game designers on the game, spoke at a roundtable with the devs of Cataclismo and Diplomacy Is Not An Option about the topic "Few against Many: designing overwhelming tactical encounters".

In real-time strategy and turn-based tactics games, nothing is more thrilling than when players are massively outnumbered by undead hordes, swamped into armies of pixels or a crowd of angry knights... and still hold the line! Let's explore how to design challenging battles where small squads or fragile defenses face overwhelming enemy forces. From last stands to carefully calculated retreats, both in real-time and turn-based systems, let's unveil the meticulous design schemes and crafted recipes of making games where the few battles against the many.

We were so glad to talk about this complex but fascinating topic with such talented people!

An update about DLC 3

On the dev side, the development of DLC 3 is going smoothly! We organized a closed Alpha a few days ago with a very small group of players to playtest it and give us their first impressions.

Mind you, this was a really early version of the DLC 3, but we wanted to do it to see if the concept in itself worked (as it's NOT a map/race/weapons DLC). Good news is that feedback was really positive!

We still have a lot of work to do on this one, but we're most likely do other betas before the release of the DLC :)

This is all today!

Take care <3

Hello Heroes!

It's finally summer in here, and we've survived the first heatwaves of the year. We're working hard on the third DLC for The Last Spell, and we hope you'll like it.

As we announced before, this will be very different from the first 2 DLCs, but we hope you'll like them as well!

In the meantime, we have a VERY cool bundle to announce. Our dear friends at Chimera Entertainment, makers of the AMAZING Songs of Silence (we still can't get over this GORGEOUS art!), just released their 1.4 Major Update last month, and gave us the opportunity to make a bundle with The Last Spell!

And Songs of Silence is currently 50% off on Steam!

If you like epic battles, formidable heroes, and tactical battles mixing 4X and autobattle, you do NOT want to miss this one!

If you already own The Last Spell, you can get Songs of Silence for 10% off! (and vice versa if you already own Songs of Silence ;))

Take care, heroes! <3

Hello Heroes!

A new patch is available!

Balancing

• Increases duration by 1 turn for debuff added by “Upgraded Enemies” apocalypse on Runers' skill

Fixes

• Fixed contagion not being spread when a target has an immunity to a status,
• Fixed skills with cardinals not displaying the cardinal icon if their max range was equal to 1 without modifiers when hovering items in the city's inventory,
• Fixed bonepiles being loaded in the map if they had 0 hp left (happens when quitting the game after scavenging a bonepile without waiting for the destruction animation),
• Fixed trap icons being blank after taking the omen 'Omen of the Trapper',
• Fixed Dwarves and Elves being able to get the 'Leapfrog' perk in their perk tree after using perk reroll while having the omen 'Omen of Leaps',

Balancing

• Increases duration by 1 turn for all defensive attribute debuffs added by “Upgraded Enemies” apocalypse,
• Update of all scroll damage according to their respective skills,
• Reducing Abalone Seed range from 15 to 6,

QoL

• Added a perk tooltip alongside the race tooltip when the race has a perk,
• Added range preview when the perk Epidemic is selected,
• Modified attack preview secondary icons for dispel & purg

• 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!

Fixes:

• Fixed 'Falcon Seed'seed upgraded 'Flying Thorns' skill having 4 range instead of 6
• Fixed 'BOOM!' perk damages not being properly applied on each target (the damages were reduced after each hit)
• Fixed 'Manual Damage Trap' skill being able to affect the caster
• Fixed 'Surgical Strikes' perk effects not being consumed when dropping below the Move threshold by using a skill

Balancing & QoL:

• 'Shower of Blows' perk bonuses are now reset at the start of each day
• 'Deadly Ranger' perk now shows bonuses before unlock

• A fanart
• Why you love the game
• Your favourite memory of you playing the game