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Press release:
COLOGNE, GERMANY — August 27, 2026. Every survivor aboard your sand-ship can be worth more dead than alive. Announced today from the Gamescom show floor, Dunebound Tactics launches on Steam on Monday, September 14. It is a roguelite, turn-based tactical RPG of caravans, sacrifice, and terrain you can tear apart, built by Terahard Studios and published by indie.io, and a free demo is live now on Steam and playable at Booth F011g, Hall 10.2, this weekend during Gamescom.

The world runs on Elios, a resource that rewrites life and death and leaves crystals where the dead used to be. It powers the engine that drags your caravan across the Sands. It also sits inside every member of your crew. When a battle takes its toll, the infirmary is one option. Extraction is the other, and it leaves a survivor as a husk while the engine keeps turning. Neither choice is free, and the dunes rarely make the first one easy.

That pressure lands in combat, where the battlefield is something you build rather than something you find. Obliterate cover or drag it out of position. Summon ice pillars to choke enemy movement or explosive ones to trap them. Lay mines, set traps, then shove an Imperial into the pitfall you dug two turns earlier. Caravan skills reach in from off the field to buff your party or clear the way for it. This is not a cover-and-shoot affair. It is a game about deciding what the ground is going to do next.

Legend places Haven somewhere beyond the Sands, a sanctuary for anyone desperate enough to go looking. Nobody who has gone has come back. Each attempt feeds the next one, with the wrecks of previous caravans yielding modules and sometimes survivors, and dynamic world generation reshaping the route every time. Fifteen classes, sixteen traits, and more than fifty modules go into a crew, and thirty-eight enemy types stand between it and the horizon as the Imperials and the Arcanists fight over what is left.

The demo is playable on the show floor at Gamescom this week at the indie.io booth in Hall 10.2, Stand F011g, running through August 30. It travels to PAX West next, September 4 to 7 in Seattle, on indie.io Booth #316. Members of the Terahard team are at Gamescom and available for interviews on request.

For everyone not in Cologne, the demo is live on Steam right now and was rebuilt around player feedback after Steam Next Fest, with reworked encounters, smarter enemy AI, and a full balancing pass. Dunebound Tactics launches on Steam on September 14, 2026.