Wayward Shadows

About this game

Travel through the rural United States and help people rid their small towns of the monsters that infest them. Every case you solve will grant your hunters experience, skills and equipment. But don’t take too long - something bad is coming, and you have to be ready to face it.


Every mysterious murder you solve will help your hunters gather experience, skills and equipment. Level up and build your hunters into efficient monster killers.
Endless combinations will make every run different and challenging. But death is not the end. Your legacy will live on and you earn legacy points to distribute which permanently improve your stats in all future runs.

Features

• Rogue-lite strategy gameplay: Embark on a highly replayable monster hunting journey
  
• The tough difficulty level will test your skills
  
• Travel the country and solve procedurally generated mysteries

Survive turn-based battles against deadly, supernatural creatures using your skill and knowledge. Choose the right weapons, damage types and tactics for each monster. Do you know how to kill a Wraith or a Werewolf? Use your monster hunting journal to track which monster is vulnerable to what elements and weapons. Each battle could be your last, so better show up prepared!

Features

• Survive challenging turn based battles
  
• Fight unique monsters with different strengths and weaknesses
  
• Prepare the right skills, equipment and tactics

Pick two hunters and a vehicle and build your very own monster hunting team. Find the best combination of skills and equipment to survive as long as possible. Each hunter has unique skills and can carry different weapons and armor. Level up and improve your hunter's stats and efficiency. Along the way you will find hidden hunter bazaars and pawn shops to equip your hunters with deadly weapons.

Features

• Pick from many unique hunters and vehicles
  
• Collect weapons and optimize your equipment
  
• Min-Max your team of hunters
  
• Manage your cash and don't go broke!

Latest news

• Patch Notes·24 Jun 2026Official

  Inventory & Character Sheet Update

  Inventory & Character Sheet UpdateThe character window has been a little bit of an eye sore for the longest time. You use it quite a lot during your run, since it has all the info of your hunters, vehicle and equipment. And as a developer you get used to the way it looks and it is easy to overlook that it might be confusing, especially to new players. Progress has been slow but over the last weeks I've been cleaning up the user interface so you can spend less time squinting and more time hunting. The inventory and character sheet got a solid visual upgrade.Here's what's new:Improved UI for the inventory and character sheetRe-did the stat point UIMade things much easier to read overallStreamlined character stat information (less clutter, better grouping)I also added a ton of new icons + smaller tweaksThese changes should make managing gear and checking your hunter’s progress feel a lot nicer during your runs.There are countless other screens in the game that need to be worked over and polished but UI work is always a slow process for me.Skill TreesThe skill trees in the game a pretty minimal but important at the same time. Each of the five character stats has its own little tree with useful perks to unlock. Ok, technically it is not a tree, since there are no branches but you get the idea. Each level up provides the opportunity to invest points into a stat and unlock the connected perks. And naturally there is never just enough to unlock it all.That is it for this short update today, stay tuned for more info soon and as always, thank you for following the development of Wayward Shadows.
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• Announcements·30 Jan 2026Official

  Keyboard Shortcuts And Some Other Detours

  Keyboard Shortcuts And Some Other DetoursA lot has happened and Wayward Shadows is coming together nicely. Sure, it still feels like a release date is decades away and everything moves at glacial speed, but progress is happening.I actually wanted to post some more cool new screenshots from the combat rework and the new weapons, but truth is, there isn’t much to show and I have been busy with other features. While working on the combat part, I realized how much the game is still lacking in terms of keyboard shortcuts and user interface functionality. This led to a little detour and a couple of new features in the settings menu.So instead of getting screenshots of new monsters and maps you are getting a video of the settings menu. Enjoy!Boring But ImportantThe settings are in a really nice place, and the game now allows you to remap pretty much any action to any keyboard, mouse or controller button.I always dislike it when games don’t allow you to remap the keys and I wanted to make this stuff is working early on.Don’t like your left mouse click selecting a unit? Just remap the action to Ctrl-Shift-Alt F12 or anything else you like. All jokes aside, this is also a really nice feature in terms of accessibility because it allows support of pretty much all custom controllers and other input devices.On the setup side things look really boring as you can see.More Input SupportThe goal is to pretty much support any gamepad and input device out there and let players remap anything they like. Things like full touch and controller support are still not working and are on the list for this year. I'll be jumping around between those kinds of tech tasks and actual gameplay work.That is probably not the most thrilling update of all, but it's part of the development process. As always, thanks for sticking around and following Wayward Shadows!
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• Announcements·7 Nov 2025Official

  Monster Party

  Just because Halloween is over doesn’t mean we’re done talking monsters!Over the last two weeks the entire supernatural roster of Wayward Shadows has been under the knife. We’ve redrawn, retuned, and rebalanced every ugly creature that might try to kill your hunters. The forces of evil have never looked (or fought) better.Monster balancing in Wayward Shadows comes down to three simple pillars:VisualsCombatStory & CluesVisualsGetting the visuals right is exactly what you’d expect: make the monster look good and, above all, scary.In combat we use 2.5D rendering—hand-drawn 2D sprites that move across a 3D battle map. Is that as cool as having fully animated 3D monsters? Not quite, but as an indie team we can tell you: it's way more affordable ːsteamhappyːTake a look at these three supernatural creatures you might run into at your local graveyard.Combat BalancingEach monster has a ton of values used during combat to make the fight unique and engaging. Besides the straightforward things such as hit points, movement and turn initiative, each monster also has unique vulnerabilities and resistances. Some monsters will be more vulnerable to fire or holy damage, while others will be almost immune to it. Knowing what monster is vulnerable against which weapon type or element will make your hunter’s life a lot easier.We put a lot of time into building tools that allow us to easily tweak and rebalance all combat values since we expect to do a ton of adjustments, even after release.Story and CluesBefore your hunters can fight a monster, they first have to hunt it down and find it. This is where the story bits and clues come in. Each monster leaves certain clues behind that can help to identify it. Once your hunters enter a new town, they have to go looking for evidence, interview witnesses and sort out what clues are important and which ones aren’t.The best tool for this is the hunter journal which helps to track the found clues.There is still a lot of work to do for us before al...
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• Announcements·15 Aug 2025Official

  Modding & Tools

  Modding & ToolsSo here is the good news: The editor and modding tools for the Wayward Shadows are coming along great and we have made great progress in the last couple of weeks.The bad news: Surprising no one, we have realized that providing a fully fleshed out modding kit is an enormous amount of work and that it probably won’t be available in the release version right away.That being said, the goal is to at least provide basic ability to mod the game and then expand upon that post-release.So, what is the goal for the ‘moddability’ of Wayward Shadows then? In a perfect world I’d like players to be able to mod:HuntersVehiclesMonstersEquipmentBattle MapsEventsNaturally some things are more complicated and require more work than others. While changing a hunter’s or monster’s health, name or textures is relatively easy, things like creating new maps or events is quite tricky. I think we’ll be able to provide tools that will let you create your own hunters and vehicles or tweak any stats of the existing hunters.I’ll try and provide more info on the progress of those individual items in future updates. Now let’s talk about the more difficult things. Battle MapsThe turn-based combat is a big part of Wayward Shadows and having a good number of fun battle maps to play on is quite important. Creating those takes time, and so far, the process to create new maps has been painfully slow and we have come to the conclusion that we will need a proper map editor that allows us to set up good looking fun maps comfortably and quickly.This is why most work time this summer has been going into creating a new map editor. Progress has been great, but we are far from finished.Terrain PaintingPainting the terrain has been one of the main pain points when it comes to how we have been building maps. We decided to do a complete rewrite of the terrain shader and painting system. This resulted in a really nice and easy to use system which makes it actually fun to create new maps and paint terra...
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• Announcements·18 Apr 2025Official

  Tooltips Everywhere!

  Tooltips I just got done with a huge tooltip pass and there are a ton of UI elements that now have tooltips. Most screens and windows have gotten a lot of attention and do a better job at providing important information now. When I watched people playtest the game, I noticed certain areas where I saw them looking for more information but couldn’t find it. How is your hunter’s health value actually calculated? Does equipping this weapon increase any of my stats? Why is my charisma at 0? Etc. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42765680/dc361464d9fb878e1043015df693a35f83393079.gif Now a lot of those places have a nice breakdown of important information displayed via a tooltip. Still more work needs to be done but it is a good start. Especially the character window and the journal now have a bunch of new tooltips. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42765680/7b2fb6d66764091ab8246f2aa3fc3dd51c534a71.gif Tooltip Setting Along with the new tooltip content I also added settings to customize tooltip length, just in case players prefer super short or long pop-up times. And of course there is more complicated stuff to come, such as tooltips when not using a mouse but a gamepad or something else. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42765680/33775e8a940d02d919a99461edf8c8744c1ef686.png Nested Tooltips Nested tooltips are all the rage right now. A lot of the games over the last couple of years have really shown how cool nested tooltips can be. I love games that have deep, endless nested tooltips. However, this stuff isn’t exactly super easy to write. I did some tests with nested tooltips (holding Shift to freeze the current tip) and it works well but actually implementing it properly and working throughout the game is another story. For now I put the feature in the backlog and will revisit it after release. But let me know if this is something you consider more important and I might take another look. That is it for now! As always, thank you for following the development of Wayward Shadows!
  Read full article on Community Announcements (TurbulentMinds)