Outcast Tales came out free on Steam on Monday, October 26, 2026, Hardlane Studio and publisher Inner Pocket announced. It is a turn-based roguelite RPG about a crew of flawed heroes in a wasteland, and it runs on Windows PC and Linux, in English and Russian. There is no DLC and no supporter pack. Every crew is a seating plan, and Outcast Tales is a game about who you put next to whom.
It nearly did not come out at all. The team went quiet for more than two years. In August, it wrote that the game had been “stuck in a bit of a release limbo” and that the limbo was over. Inner Pocket signed on to publish, and in September the two said it would be free. Inner Pocket is “publishing a game that won’t make them a cent, because they believe this is the right thing to do,” the developers wrote on Steam.
Each crew member is a class combined with a personality type, and the pair decides what they can do. The roster named so far includes the Hound, the Technomancer, the Savage and the Alchemist. The Alchemist uses a life-loss mechanic and hands his allies stimulants that toughen their defenses. The Antihero is one of the personality types. Fights are turn-based against robots, mutants and desert raiders, each with its own abilities and weaknesses, and crew abilities work better in combination.
Then the seating plan starts to matter. Depending on your choices, crew members can form bonds, fall in love, or come to despise each other. The game also tells choose-your-own-adventure stories, and a Twitch integration lets a streamer’s chat make the decisions during events.
The party-chemistry family Outcast Tales joins
Party chemistry as a system has a short family tree. Dragon Age: Origins gave every companion an approval meter in 2009, and BioWare used it to decide who stayed and who walked out. Darkest Dungeon, from Red Hook Studios in 2016, made stress a resource, so one hero at the breaking point could drag the whole party down with them. Outcast Tales sits between the two. Its relationships come from your choices, as in Dragon Age, but they play out inside roguelite runs, as in Darkest Dungeon.
The full release has 15 endings, 13 more than the demo, and some of them lead to new bosses. “Every crew gets its own story and finale,” the team wrote of its motto during development. Reaching all of them takes many runs. The finales themselves are yours to find.
Outcast Tales is free on Steam now. Choose the seating with care.
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