Entropy is a Vagrant Story-inspired RPG from the makers of Dread Delusion

Lovely Hellscape, the studio behind Dread Delusion, has announced Entropy — a grimy RPG heading to Steam Early Access in August. A demo was available during Steam Next Fest in June.

The game drops you into Draenog, a city that was supposed to be a safe haven until reanimated corpses crash the town square. You survive the massacre as part of a traveling acting troupe — armed with prop weapons — and then spend the rest of the game rebuilding your party from mercenaries, stragglers, and general losers. Permadeath is in, so every companion you recruit can be gone for good. A spreading plague layers on top of the monster problem, shutting down gates and cranking up paranoia across the land.

Vagrant Story is the clearest touchstone: combat lets you position your party and target individual enemy limbs, staggering opponents or removing something important entirely. Visually the game leans hard into that same late-'90s aesthetic — right down to the cheek-hugging fantasy speedos. The look is the work of artist Artyom Trakhanov, and while Entropy trades Vagrant Story's haunting, tender lighting for something yellowed and grimy, the world still has a distinct personality. It sits somewhere between that cult classic and the Fear & Hunger series — nasty and dangerous, but not quite as relentlessly bleak as a game that opens with a goblin sawing your legs off.

Entropy hits Steam Early Access in August. If the demo during Next Fest was any indication — one playthrough ended with a magic user losing both legs before dying off-screen during a fetch quest for an old man's pipe — it is not pulling its punches.