R-Games announced Astral Dive on November 5, a turn-based JRPG and deckbuilder for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch in 2027. The studio’s headline calls it a “love letter to a golden age,” and the age in question is the 2D role-playing game. No price has been named. The announcement also says early 2027, while the Steam page says Q2 2027, so the year is the firm part.
A love letter is judged by whether the writer knows the person it is addressed to, and this one comes from a new hand. R-Games is an independent studio inside R-Factory, an IT consulting company based in Venice with more than 10 years behind it. Astral Dive is its debut.
Atlas is a young mage, and something shook the foundations of his magic academy many years ago. He goes looking for the truth through astral portals, across seven locations, and collects allies with pasts of their own along the way. The game’s site adds a brother who needs rescuing. That is where I stop.
The fights are turn-based and built around magical cards called Stellar Tiles. Players collect spells, shape them into a deck and look for synergies against creatures and bosses. The announcement also promises a way to manipulate the battlefield with those tiles, without saying how. That is the sentence I most want explained, because it decides how much of this is new.
The older card-battle RPG this letter will be read against
Cards in a JRPG have a family tree. Baten Kaitos, from Monolith Soft and tri-Crescendo, put a deck in each party member's hands on GameCube in Japan in 2003. Players had seconds to play a limited number of Magnus cards, and number sequences raised the damage. R-Games does not name it as an influence. Still, a 2023 remaster on Switch and a 2024 release on Steam put that game back in reach, so some readers of this letter may already hold the earlier correspondence.
Steam lists single-player only and eight languages. The pixel art is entirely hand-drawn, from character animations to spell effects. The site says two expansions have been conceived if the game does well, and that a demo or Early Access is under consideration.
A love letter still has to arrive. For now Astral Dive is a wishlist entry, and the postmark reads 2027.
