Open World Real-time exploration, grim turn-based battles, and a feature-packed combat playtest V2 are ready on Steam.
I just realized I’d never actually written an overview of Happy Bastards, one of the most interesting open-world tactical RPGs currently in development. With a new playtest dropping these days, I figured it was the perfect chance to jump in, so here are some details about the game.
Happy Bastards is an open-world tactical RPG from Clever Plays where you do everything except be a virtuous hero. You play as Kev, a shameless chancer who wants to become the land’s most famous hero by sending a rotating cast of unlucky mercenaries to do all the dangerous work while he soaks up the credit.
The game is coming to PC via Steam with a release date still listed as “to be announced,” and a dedicated combat playtest is currently live in its second major version.
At its core, Happy Bastards mixes real-time exploration with tight, turn-based battles. On the world map, you move in real time across a hand-crafted fantasy realm, visiting towns, poking into dungeons, and dealing with mayors, heroes, monster leaders, and local celebrities.
The game leans hard into parody and moral bankruptcy: every group you meet can become ally or enemy, and the way you chase fame, who you flatter, who you betray, which monsters you “partner” with, feeds back into how the world reacts to your little traveling circus.
Combat takes place in small arenas that emphasize positioning, line of sight, and hard tactical choices. You assemble a squad of procedurally generated bastards, each with their own stats, skills, perks, look, and personality.
Battles are grid-based and turn-based, with different enemy squads and layouts pushing you to change your approach from fight to fight. The game features injuries, dismemberment, and permadeath, and then lets you patch things up with grafting, transmogrification, or even raising the dead when you’re desperate enough.
The bastards don’t suddenly turn into obedient soldiers. They argue, get into trouble, and generally remind you that you’re managing people, not chess pieces.
The game builds a lot of its flavor on their chaotic behavior and on the way they crash against towns, factions, and one another. Under the hood, a real-time simulation runs the behavior of NPCs and monsters, so your choices don’t just flip a flag; they can push the world into new states and generate emergent situations on future runs. Combined with random elements in characters, events, and encounters, that’s where a lot of the replayability comes from.
The current combat playtest focuses on that tactical layer, and version 2 adds more personality and more clarity. Bastards now speak up in combat through speech bubbles, commenting on what’s happening and giving you a better sense of their attitude.
That ties into Battle Whims, where a character will occasionally ask you to do something specific during a fight. These work like secondary objectives that come from the character’s own situation; deliver, and they’re pleased, fail, and they won’t just shrug it off.
The old morale mechanic has also been reshaped into a Composure system. Negative events can trigger a Composure Break, with more severe situations leading to harsher effects, while high composure pushes characters “In the Flow,” boosting multiple combat stats.
It’s a way to connect the bastards’ mental state to real tactical consequences, and it fits the fantasy of managing a squad of barely contained egos.
Version 2 also gives tactics-minded players more information and control. A new combat log lets you scroll back through what happened, and detailed tooltips expose the math behind attacks and abilities, both on the log entries and when you’re previewing a move. Anyway you can find the devlog here, with all the details about this new playtest and how to access it.
Right now, Happy Bastards is still listed as “coming soon” on Steam, with the full release date yet to be confirmed. Below is the latest trailer available.
