Lightbulb Crew’s blood-drenched tactical roguelite Ex Sanguis just hit an important milestone. The studio has confirmed that strategy specialist Firesquid is now officially publishing the game, and to mark the occasion, they’ve rolled out a fourth Steam playtest tied to a new publisher sale on Valve’s storefront.
The team calls Firesquid “the Firesquid family” and stresses how important it is for Ex Sanguis to have a dedicated publisher behind it. Firesquid, which already handles a small stable of tactics and strategy titles, is celebrating with a Publisher Sale featuring discounts, demos, and multiple playtests on Steam, Ex Sanguis included.
Anyway, what is really important for me here is that the fourth playtest is available now and is described as a sizeable update, centred on a fresh biome, and a new enemy type, a ranger-style foe that joins the roster of things trying to erase your squad from existence.
Alongside that, Lightbulb Crew is testing a new layer of team management through an updated management screen, plus a new “Destruction” mission type that adds another objective flavour to the existing runs. The build also brings new skills to experiment with, a global UI overhaul, and a round of bug fixes on top.
Access works the same way as in previous tests. You request access from the Ex Sanguis Steam store page, and the developers grant keys in waves. If you’re not picked immediately, they say they’ll keep sending invitations over the coming days.
Once you are in, there’s no playtime cap on this round; they explicitly encourage players to “play as much as you want,” which makes sense given how many systems they’re trying to validate in one go.
Feedback is being funnelled through a Google Form and the studio’s Discord, continuing the pattern of structured data plus direct conversation that they’ve used since the very first test.
This fourth test sits at the end of a clear iteration chain. The second playtest back in early October focused almost entirely on procedural generation, running on greyboxed maps to stress-test systems rather than visuals.
A few weeks later, the Halloween-themed third playtest moved the action to a Desert area and shifted attention to meta-progression and meta-upgrades, with runs that could easily stretch past an hour as players unlocked talents, pushed into higher difficulties, and fought a boss encounter at the end of the route.
Now the City biome, team management tools, and UI pass suggest Ex Sanguis is gradually moving from raw system prototyping toward something closer to its intended campaign structure.
For anyone only catching up now, Ex Sanguis is a turn-based tactical roguelite from Lightbulb Crew, the Franco-Swedish studio behind Othercide.
The game keeps the studio’s love of sharp, monochrome-plus-red visuals but takes it into a different corner of dark fantasy.
You command the Stillae, elite warriors tied to a dying divinity known as the Mater, fighting to restart the flow of life in a world suffocated by an oppressive force called Stasis. In the game’s fiction, blood is resistance, a violent, bright counterpoint to a world deliberately drained of colour.
Battles lean heavily on a visible timeline and positional play. Each encounter unfolds on grid-based maps where you can reorder turns by speeding up, delaying, or swapping units along that timeline, nudging enemy turns out of sync with each other so they’re easier to handle.
The environment is meant to be as much a tool as your abilities: explosive objects, line-of-sight blockers, and status-inflicting props can all be used to create chain reactions and lock down parts of the arena.
Physical effects, knockbacks, forced facings, flanking bonuses, and damage-over-time are designed to sit on top of those basics, rewarding players who think a few turns ahead.
Layered over that is a roguelite structure where, between fights, you move across a node-based map, choosing routes that effectively let you set your own difficulty. You can cut straight toward bosses for shorter, higher-risk runs, or detour through extra encounters and resource nodes to gear up your squad before taking on tougher objectives.
All missions feed into some form of progression, and the developers emphasise that even failed runs should leave you with something to show for the attempt. Skill drops are randomized and are meant to combine with each character’s loadout in different ways, pushing you to find new synergies rather than locking into a single “correct” build.
Ex Sanguis is slated to release in 2026, launching first in Early Access on PC via Steam. Lightbulb Crew has stated they expect to stay in Early Access for at least six months, with the exact timeline depending on feedback and development progress.
Over that period, they plan to add more content, refine the balance, and potentially explore additional game modes, with console versions planned for further down the line.
Taken together, the Firesquid deal and this fourth playtest signal that Ex Sanguis is moving out of its earliest experimental phase and into something a bit more structured. There’s a publisher to help with visibility, a steady cadence of playtests that each focus on specific parts of the design, and a clear plan to use Early Access as an extended balancing and content pass.
For players who enjoyed Othercide’s mix of brutal tactics and strong art direction, or for anyone curious about a roguelite built around timeline control and chain reactions, this new build is likely the best snapshot yet of where Ex Sanguis is heading.
