“I would never have guessed it!” This is the sort of reaction we usually get when people learn that the same studio made both Serious Sam and The Talos Principle, one we heard many times before.

Yes, there’s a stark difference between a frantic first-person shooter and a philosophical puzzler, but guess what? Some of us love turn-based games even better! 

So much so, that a group of Croteam’s lead engineers and turn-based lovers decided to form Room-C Games a few years back, a spin-off studio with the sole purpose of creating a turn-based game of their own. The team was soon joined by Jonas & Verena Kyratzes, a legendary writing duo that needs no special introduction to our fans, and soon The Hand of Merlin was born.

A fantasy turn-based rogue-lite RPG, where medieval arms clash with sci-fi horror, had an interesting time in development full of fun design choices (check out MarkoP’s amazing dev blog diaries here!), including the switch to the latest version of Serious Engine, but today is an exciting day as we’re happy to announce that The Hand of Merlin has joined the Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition! 

This means that you can play the exclusive demo right away, and take those first steps in Albion on your epic journey from Camelot to Jerusalem. Time is of the essence here, as the demo will vanish – pooof! – as soon as the Festival ends on Sunday. 

The newly released teaser trailer will stay on the Steam game page a bit longer, as will your comments, follows, likes and wishlist actions – we’ll forever cherish those!

For all The Hand of Merlin chatter, visit the dedicated Discord server and the official game page on Facebook. Follow Croteam on Twitter and Instagram, like us on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Oh, and don’t forget to join our ever-growing Croteam family on Discord and Reddit.