Sorry folks, some bad news: Neverway, the horror life sim and RPG combo from one of the artists behind Celeste and the composer of Fez, has been delayed into 2027. While it never had an exact release date anyway, developer Coldblood Inc. shared word of the delay in a Steam blog post earlier this week.

“Our process has always been about understanding what you, as a player, are feeling when you play the game and making sure that aligns with the story. Seeing how the prologue resonated with so many of you, along with internal playtests, inspired us on how the later parts of Neverway could take shape,” explains the blog post. “This means some of the original chapters and areas grew in a way we hope will meet your expectations. We believe in this game’s potential, which is why we decided to take this extra time to make it the very best version it can be. And don’t worry, we don’t plan on growing it any more than that. As much as we love working on Neverway, we know you’re excited to play it too and don’t want to delay it again.”

While I’m sure it’ll be a disappointment to some, the devs (of which there are only three, “plus a few collaborators,” so make sure you cut them some slack) offered a bit of a peek behind the curtain to tide us all over. For one, across the game’s 20 characters there’s more than 250 routines that they follow, so good luck to the wiki contributors on that front. Speaking of those characters, you can romance 12 of them! Not at once, I think, no mention of that, but at the very least separately. Some wonderful portraits can be seen over on the aforementioned blog post, so do give ’em a look.

Developing relationships with those characters does still sound important however, as it’s also been revealed that Neverway will have multiple endings, and your bonds “may be directly tied to the ending of the game…” Coldblood further explain that “Some are good. Or maybe evil. Depends on your point of view. We are trying to avoid “bad endings” and just making them interesting in different ways!”

It all sounds like it’s coming together quite nicely, just needs a tad more time! And while you wait, you can wishlist it on Steam, where there’s also a demo for you to try out if you fancy.