Everlast: Undying Tale Preview: Release Date and Gameplay

What Everlast: Undying Tale is

InSpades, a small studio on its first game, calls this "a love letter to MMO classics in an Action RPG Package". You're a Pyrrhic, cursed by Death so you can't stay dead, and you level skills by using them. The press kit lists 16 skills with "no levels, no class restrictions"; a May playtest post said 17, so the count is still moving. The store page names woodworking, occultism and fishing, and promises progress that "occurs much more quickly" than the games it borrows from.

The lineage is easy to read. Skill-by-doing progression, trading, duels with items at stake, castle sieges: this is the classic MMO toolkit, scaled down to a server you can host. When CGMagazine covered the reveal in 2025 it said the game "looks an awful lot like" Palia, with some World of Warcraft mixed in, and the studio's stated aim was to "modernize and bring classic MMO systems into the present gaming landscape".

Image: Everlast: Undying Tale press kit (InSpades)

What "MMO-lite" means here

This is the question players keep asking. One Steam forum thread opens with "Seems like a game either is or isn't and MMO" (Steam discussions), and a reply compares it to Fantasy Life "with better multiplayer". Other players reach for older names. One Bluesky user read it as "inspired by old-school games like everquest and runescape classic" (Bluesky), and another, after a session of RuneScape: Dragonwilds, posted that "everlast undying tale is doing runescape dragonwilds better than jagex can" (Bluesky). Bold for a game with no store reviews yet, but it tells you which itch it scratches.

The store answer: "Play completely solo, privately with a few friends, or join a larger public world with up to 100 other players." Each server is its own world, and your character can move between servers if the host allows it, and the server browser added live player counts and ping in the Next Fest build. The more interesting idea is the Desolate Zones. They're server-wide repair projects, and fixing one rebuilds that world "permanently", adding gathering spots, crafting services or easier routes. On a busy public server that's a shared town project. Solo, it's a long to-do list.

What the official videos show

We watched the 84-second Gameplay Reveal and the 4-minute NextFest Demo Update video frame by frame. The reveal leans on the bright side: at 0:30 an Occultic Shrine panel shows a "Charge Bonus x2.0 / XP Bonus x2.0" over a row of purple items, at 0:39 a character fishes off a misty shore, and from 0:57 to 1:03 a party fights a giant swamp creature among dead trees.

The update video is the more honest look at the current build, because it shows the interface. At 0:40 two players fill a trade window, at 1:20 the fast travel map opens, and at 2:08 a five-player party takes on a level 40 Rattling Golem in The Great Graveyard while a quest tracker lists "Altarior Motive". The corner of that frame reads "Alpha", which matches what the studio says in writing.

Screenshot: frame at 2:08 of the official NextFest Demo Update video (InSpades)

Is the Early Access build ready?

The October 8 patch notes are long: trading, duels, a world difficulty setting "ranging from easier than normal to a perma-death mode", fast travel, boss fights, a five-wave undead siege of Kal Castle, headshots for ranged weapons and full controller support. The Next Fest build added macOS support and overhauled the UI, saves and networking. The same post also says "We still have a ton of systems left to finish before our Early Access release." That's a plain admission, and it's the line we'd weigh most.

Early forum threads point at the same gaps. One player who quit after about an hour wrote that "Crafting mini games are unnecessary and not fun in the least" and that "how to proceed is often unclear" (Steam discussions). Another objected to item loss: "the drop inventory on death is an outdated mechanic that shouldn't exist in modern games" (Steam discussions). Since difficulty is chosen per world, that one may depend on the world you join. A third, replying on October 20, complained about "how poor the performance is" (Steam discussions). These are early forum posts on a store page with no reviews yet, so treat them as warnings to test, not a verdict.

Screenshot: frame at 0:30 of the official Gameplay Reveal (InSpades)

Price against content

There's no price yet. A week before launch the store still shows only a release date, and one forum reply in Next Fest week reads "I still do not know how much they are asking for" (Steam discussions). The only signal is the Kickstarter, where a copy of the game came with the $15 tier. If launch pricing lands near that, an Early Access ticket for a co-op group is easy to justify. If it lands well above, wait for the first patches. The studio plans to keep adding systems until a 1.0 release, and our list of Early Access games worth buying right now shows what a finished-enough Early Access launch looks like.

Verdict

Who it suits: small groups who miss old-school skill grinding and want to host their own world, and solo players curious about that loop at a faster pace. The free demo covers both cases.

Who should wait: anyone who needs polish at launch, anyone who hates losing items on death (check which difficulty a server runs), and anyone on a lower-end PC, since the minimum spec already asks for 16 GB of RAM.

We'd pick the demo now and decide at launch week, once the price is public. If you want a co-op RPG that's already through its rough patch, our Farever review covers one that has been in Early Access longer, and the Farever launch report shows how its first week went. For more festival picks, see our best Steam Next Fest October 2026 demos and the co-op demos list. If you're wondering what happens to the demo after Sunday, read whether Steam Next Fest demos expire. For finished games to play together tonight, start with the best co-op games of September 2026 or the cheaper indie co-op picks.

How we checked this

This is a sponsored preview: InSpades paid for the placement and sent a Steam key, and did not see or approve the text. On October 21, 2026 we read the Steam store page, every InSpades announcement on Steam since the 2025 reveal, the English press kit and the game's Steam forum threads, and we stepped through the Gameplay Reveal and the NextFest Demo Update video (the timestamps above are from those). We haven't played the game or the demo yet, so there's no score and no hands-on claim here.

References

• Everlast: Undying Tale on Steam
• InSpades press kit
• CGMagazine: Everlast: Undying Tale announced
• Gameplay Reveal, official channel
• NextFest Demo Update video, official channel