Roboto Games has officially released the public demo for Stormforge, giving everyone a chance to jump into its storm-battered fantasy world ahead of the game’s planned Early Access launch later this year. For me, though, this is also a nice opportunity to return to a game I’ve been following for a while.
I first wrote about Stormforge last year, around its trailer release during Gamescom 2025. Since then, I had a chance to go considerably deeper.
I recently joined Roboto Games founders Curt Bererton and Mathilde Pignol for a co-op session. While we played and talked about the game. I recorded the whole thing as fairly raw gameplay footage — no carefully choreographed trailer sequence, just developers actually playing their own game and showing me how things work.
First, the Demo
The public demo is now available on Steam and arrives just ahead of Steam’s PvE Survival Crafting Fest, which runs from August 31 through September 7.
It gives players access to character creation and three classes: Warrior, Ranger and Mage.
There are two biomes to explore. The Meadows introduce Stormforge’s wind storms and tornadoes, while the Forest brings poison-infused storms and its own dangers. You can play solo or cooperatively with up to eight players.
There is already a decent slice of the wider game here: exploration, combat, a boss encounter, the first Forest dungeons and previews of systems including building, gliding and sailing (well, almost hehe, see my gameplay below). The storms remain one of Stormforge’s defining mechanics rather than simply environmental decoration. Tornadoes can pick up rocks, trees and enemies, while other storms affect visibility or damage players. Going into one is dangerous, but storms are also filled with valuable resources.
It creates a rather good survival-game dilemma: the place screaming “do not go there” is precisely where you might want to go.
Watch my Co-op gameplay with Curt and Mathilde:
Then They Showed Me the World Creator
This is where things became much more interesting. Calling Stormforge’s Mods a “world editor” almost undersells it. What Roboto Games has put into the game feels closer to a game maker inside the game.
Players can alter terrain, place objects, create NPCs, write dialogue and quests, change behaviours, adjust drops and generally start messing with the rules behind what exists in their world. But the clever part is that you don’t have to sit down and build an entire world from scratch. You can create a single point of interest and place it into your existing world. Or share that creation with other players.
You could spend an evening handcrafting a castle, populate it with haunting inhabitants and put a princess inside with an elaborate quest. Or you could make one stupid little critter that drops exploding barrels when it dies and have the thing spawn around the Meadows. Both are valid, and that’s the beauty of the system!
It lowers the barrier between playing somebody else’s game and making something of your own. You don’t need to become a level designer and disappear into an editor for six months. Make one funny encounter, one building, one quest or one bizarre enemy and throw it into the world.
Stormforge Creator Mods walkthrough video:
I Fully Expect Someone to Build Howl’s Moving Castle
When I originally compared Stormforge’s visual style with Miyazaki’s work, that was simply my own impression from seeing the game. Talking with Curt, however, confirmed that this wasn’t entirely accidental — that kind of art was indeed among the inspirations. Which immediately made my imagination run away with mods hehe.
Once players get their hands properly on these tools, I won’t be surprised at all if we see someone attempt to recreate the bathhouse from Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, or something equally ridiculous.
…and then someone else will probably fill it with exploding barrel-dropping chickens. Such is the natural order of player-generated content.
Survival Games Made by People Who Actually Play Survival Games
There was another thing that became increasingly obvious while playing with Curt and Mathilde.
They aren’t simply the founders of Roboto Games, nor developers studying the survival genre from a spreadsheet. They play these games themselves — a lot. And you can see the consequences in surprisingly mundane places. Normally, a survival game launches and the community immediately starts compiling the familiar list.
“Can we please craft using materials stored in nearby chests?”
“Can we respec without jumping through seventeen hoops?”
“Can you please make this thing that I do 400 times slightly less annoying?”
Then developers gradually work their way through the list over the following months.
Stormforge appears to be approaching some of this from the opposite direction. Crafting from storage is already treated as something obvious. Resetting talent points is deliberately easy, allowing you to experiment with builds rather than making every decision feel like paperwork. Construction snapping — which I completely failed to grasp on my first try — and the ability to simply copy selected elements should help you build big things much faster. Remember my super-duper towers in Nightingale? QoL features like these should let me go even further.
Construction has its own stability system, somewhat akin to Valheim, and I believe the tallest tower you can currently build is around six floors. Most likely, you can overcome that limitation with the map editor, but that’s something I still need to test myself.
Anyway, neither feature looks spectacular in a trailer. But if you’ve spent hundreds or thousands of hours playing survival games, those are exactly the little things that sell the experience. You notice when they’re missing. And you definitely notice when somebody thought about them beforehand.
A Small Demo of Something Potentially Much Bigger
Roboto Games describes itself as a small studio staffed by industry veterans, with an average of 12 years of game-development experience across the team. That experience shows, but what interests me more is where Stormforge goes once players are allowed to properly interfere with it.
The survival-crafting foundation already has plenty happening: 8-player co-op, different classes, building, sailing, gliding, dungeons, bosses and, obviously, those wonderfully destructive magical storms.
Creator Mode potentially adds another layer entirely. A developer can create only so many castles, monsters, quests and weird encounters. Give the community the tools to make them, remix them and share individual creations without requiring everyone to build an entire world from zero? That can get out of control very quickly. In the best possible way.
Stormforge is still heading toward Early Access later in 2026, with no specific release date announced yet. For now, the public demo offers two biomes and three classes, with considerably more planned as development continues.
And unlike last time I wrote about the game, you don’t need to take a trailer — or my word — for it anymore.
The demo is on Steam.
Go poke the storm.
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