It’s been a long while since we talked about The Astronauts’ dark fantasy roguelite shooter Witchfire, which has been in the works since 2017. All of that development time looks to be paying off later this year, as the developers have announced that Witchfire will hit Steam Early Access in Q4 2022.

The reveal was part of The Astronauts’ latest Q&A session with fans, which also discussed what exactly the type of game Witchfire is, and some of the game’s mechanics. In regards to going the Early Access route, the devs claim that unlike their previous games in Bulletstorm and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, the model of Early Access “makes total sense” for Witchfire. After seeing how roguelite games like Hades or Dead Cells used Early Access to refine and develop their world-building and lore alongside the gameplay, The Astronauts are looking to borrow elements from those games’ development paths to bring Witchfire to fruition.

As for the date, the team feels that nailing down a specific month rather than a range is “pointless”. “After the countless delays of countless games, we don’t think it makes a lick of sense to name a day unless you’re 100% certain it’s achievable. And we’re not 100% certain it’s achievable. So even though this timeframe does look reasonable to us, we don’t want to make fools of ourselves and commit to a particular day and month.”

And that roguelite gameplay? Initially, it wasn’t clear in previous reveals that the game would employ these mechanics, but according to the devs, the term suits Witchfire. “From our perspective, the best reason we found to call a game a roguelite is a certain level of forgiveness, usually in the form of the so-called persistence layer. In human language it means that you don’t lose everything when you die.”

“Our persistence layer is big enough for us to consider calling the game a dark fantasy RPG shooter instead of dark fantasy roguelite shooter. But, at least for now, we’re totally fine with the latter. Roguelite it is.” In other words, you’ll be punished for death, but not to the extent that you lose everything. You’ll still keep some stuff to enable you to unlock cool new things in a timely fashion.

You can check out the rest the development updates (and the random Q&A session) from the link above. Currenty, Witchfire is in development for PC via Steam.