New dark fantasy role-playing game Entropy has made a strong early impression on Steam, earning a 94% positive user review score shortly after launch. Its strong reception suggests Steam has gained another compelling turn-based RPG to offer to fans of the genre open to the early access release model.
Entropy is the latest release from Brighton, England-based indie studio Lovely Hellplace, founded in 2018 and best known for the 2024 open-world RPG Dread Delusion. The developer also contributed Shatter to the horror-focused Dread X Collection and created the launcher for Dread X Collection 2, giving its catalog a fairly consistent taste for retro visuals, strange worlds, and horror-inflected fantasy. Entropy keeps much of that identity, but while exploring a different kind of gameplay compared to the studio’s previous RPG.
Entropy Combines a Horror Setting with SRPG Gameplay
Where Dread Delusion was a first-person open-world RPG with real-time combat, Entropy is a tactical, party-based game inspired by a variety of classic JRPGs. Players control a party of up to six characters, recruit mercenaries to replace fallen companions, and develop their characters by managing and investing in stats, perks, equipment, and spells. It is therefore as much of an RPG as Dread Delusion, but with a decidedly different gameplay loop on account of its combat structure shift. The approach appears to have resonated with early adopters, with Entropy earning a 94% approval rating from its first couple hundred Steam user reviews submitted since the RPG’s early access launch on August 18.
Entropy takes place in a dying world where humanity has dwindled over time, without a single defining apocalypse to blame, leaving isolated settlements surrounded by monsters and other threats. Its story begins in the town of Draenog, where a theater performance is interrupted by a demonic attack, forcing the player’s troupe into battle and eventually into a wider attempt to stop the invasion at the center of the new dark fantasy RPG. The game is also designed to offer numerous meaningful choices that can affect its world and overarching narrative.
Like Lovely Hellplace’s earlier work, Entropy uses retro 3D graphics, with deliberately low-poly environments and creatures that preserve the studio’s preference for strange, unsettling settings over visual fidelity or realism. Resulting from that nostalgic art direction is a modest list of PC system requirements: the game asks for just 4 GB of RAM, 1 GB of available storage, and at minimum a 15-year-old Intel Core i3-2100 or 17-year-old AMD Phenom II X4 965 CPU. Its listed Nvidia GPU floor is the GeForce GTS 450 with 1 GB of VRAM, a positively ancient graphics card that predates Entropy’s early access launch by nearly 16 years.
Entropy Expected to Remain in Steam Early Access Until H2 2027
Lovely Hellplace expects Entropy to remain in Steam Early Access for about one year, through the second half of 2027. The retro RPG is structured around three acts, each set in a distinct region with its own towns, quests, dungeons, and characters. Smaller patches are planned between the major updates, while Act 3 will itself be split into two parts, with its conclusion corresponding to the 1.0 launch. The current Early Access build contains the complete first act, the Gloaming Isles, which accounts for roughly one-quarter of the finished game, as per the official developer estimate. The opening act includes two towns, three dungeons, numerous smaller locations and challenges, and a varied selection of characters, weapons, armor, and spells for players to experiment with. Lovely Hellpace says development is fully funded and that Entropy will reach version 1.0 regardless of Early Access sales, while its $11.99 base price is expected to rise incrementally as more content and features are added.
