Studio Sever and HypeTrain Digital released Agent of Strange: Arrival on Steam on Monday, a free prologue from the team that made The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante. Arrival is the standalone first chapter of Agent of Strange, a dark, story-driven RPG with immersive sim elements, and it is free on PC now. The full game has no release date yet; its Steam page says coming soon.
Sir Brante’s family tree has two branches now. Sever, a studio from Tomsk, made that branching text RPG in 2021, set in a feudal empire, with console versions in 2022. Then the house divided. Part of the team formed a new studio, Schisma, to carry on the Life and Suffering series, and Schisma released The Life and Suffering of Prince Jerian in July 2026. The rest kept the Sever name and left for a new world and a new genre.
Agent of Strange is that new world, and the studio is plain that it is no relation. Sever calls it “a completely new game in a new world,” with a different setting, characters, story and gameplay, and no link to Prince Jerian or to Sir Brante’s world.
You play a Conspirator, a covert agent sent into Brocken, a cold early-20th-century city sealed off from the world. The Traum Family rules it. They are aristocrats who opened a forbidden passage called the Red Door and came back altered. Your job is to blend in, earn trust and plan the coup that removes them. You build your own agent, with traits, a background and a cover such as clerk, student or factory worker. I will stop at the Red Door.
The studio has not said whether you fight on a turn grid or in real time. The store page names combat as one way through a conflict, next to persuasion, deception and avoidance, and Steam players have tagged it turn-based. The city reacts in real time, people can become allies or report you, and "every failure leaves a mark on you," the store page warns.
Schisma kept the family name. Sever kept the dark streak, and Arrival is free, which makes it the cheapest way to meet the other branch of the family.
