Prelude Dark Pain Signs With Strategy Publisher Firesquid and Picks Up a New Award Nomination
Quickfire Games has found a new ally for its dark fantasy tactical RPG Prelude Dark Pain. The Spanish studio has signed a publishing deal with Firesquid, the strategy-focused label based in Europe that has been building a catalog of modern strategy and tactics titles.
At the same time, Prelude Dark Pain has also been nominated for “Best Art Direction” at the Pucela Game Awards 2025, adding another line to a growing list of festival recognition.
Firesquid describes itself as a publisher dedicated to helping strategy teams bring their projects to the finish line, with long-term, “developer-focused” support. Seeing Prelude Dark Pain join that roster makes sense if you’ve been following the game’s path over the last two years.
The project has already gone through a successful Kickstarter run, has been touring events and festivals, and is targeting a Steam Early Access release once development on the first act is ready.
Prelude Dark Pain was previously named Best Strategy Game at Indie Dev Day 2023 and took home Best Indie Game at Dreamhack Valencia, both events held in Spain. The Pucela Game Awards nod, this time for art direction, underlines how much of the game’s identity sits in its presentation. A style that clearly nods to Darkest Dungeon and Mike Mignola without feeling like a straight copy.
Regarding the game, Prelude Dark Pain is a turn-based tactical RPG set in Statera, a world torn apart by war, plague, and a malignant force known as the Dark Pain. You play as Soren, a former warrior now working as a village blacksmith, who gets pulled back into conflict when the fanatical Order of the Ashen Crusade tightens its grip on the land.
Statera’s reality is literally cracking; rifts in the “veil” let in creatures of Pain, and the uprising Soren leads has to fight both human zealots and otherworldly horrors. It’s a classic setup, but the emphasis on a fragmented reality gives the writers room to play with parallel cultures and overlapping timelines.
Quickfire is building a flexible squad system as the team promises more than 20 playable characters at launch, each with two talent branches and a pool of around two dozen skills to unlock and equip.
Battles field up to five heroes at once drawn from eight classes that fill familiar roles, damage dealers, supports, assassins and more, but the number of skills per character means most units can pivot into different builds over time.
Positioning, combo setups, and status effects all matter, and external previews have highlighted how even early encounters ask players to think a few turns ahead rather than simply trading hits.
Between missions, players manage a citadel that acts as both headquarters and an economic layer.
Here you can craft weapons and armor, send small groups of heroes on raids to rescue villages, scout rivals, gather resources, or handle diplomatic tasks, with the trade-off that those heroes will be unavailable for regular battles while they’re out on assignment.
Statera itself is built as a patchwork of more than twenty cultures and factions, and Quickfire is leaning on that scale. The team talks about over 70 enemy types across human forces, beasts and other entities linked to the Dark Pain, plus boss encounters tied to major story beats and world events.
Alongside the main campaign, “World Missions” expand the lore and often gate new recruits; some heroes can only be encountered and persuaded if you pursue optional objectives and make the “right” calls in earlier choices, and the studio is clear that you won’t see every character in a single run.
The new nomination for art direction also shines a light on the music team. Prelude Dark Pain’s soundtrack is a collaboration between Spanish composer Isaac Montes and veteran Japanese composer Kumi Tanioka, whose credits include Final Fantasy XI, the Crystal Chronicles sub-series, and contributions to games like Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and Minecraft.
The pair is aiming for a somber, war-weary sound that supports the heavy comic-book visuals. From the bits that are already public, the score leans on choral and percussive elements that sit well with the game’s slow, deliberate combat pacing.
Development seems to be on a steady track. The closed demo used during the Kickstarter and later playtests has already been through several rounds of feedback, and the team says Act 1, the part planned for Early Access, is now playable from start to finish, with cinematics drawn and being colored, plus much of the music already in place.
The Kickstarter campaign itself passed the €100,000 mark and unlocked an expanded map mode, with extra stretch goals pitched around a Demon Hunter storyline and a dedicated Hardcore difficulty option for tactics veterans.
Right now, the Steam page still lists the release date as “to be announced,” and Quickfire is aiming for a PC Early Access launch sometime in 2026, with a Nintendo Switch version also in the works. A new public demo is planned for a future Steam Next Fest, following earlier closed tests.
