Snail Games and Donkey Crew have announced today that they’re pushing gritty co-op survival sandbox Bellwright into Steam early access on April 23rd. The title was only just announced in March of last year and saw a demo last summer.
“Following the 72-hour playtest at the end of the last month, we’ve received a lot of invaluable feedback from you,” Donkey Crew writes. “While many have found the game extremely enjoyable and engaging, there were some issues that needed to be addressed ahead of the release. We’ve dedicated the past few weeks to fixing all the bugs and optimizing the user experience, and rest assured that we will remain committed to ongoing content updates and fixes as we continue through Early Access.”
It’s actually a bit of a bummer that the game looks pretty because its longer history is anything but: Donkey Crew is the same outfit behind woodpunk survival MMO Last Oasis, which hit early access in 2020 and has languished there ever since – twice as long as Donkey Crew’s original estimates, which are still published on the Steam page. Reviewers there have slammed the game for its lack of updates and warned players from buying it, particularly given the ongoing silence from developers, who we might assume are too busy with Bellwright. Ahem.
The new trailer is below.
“We are actually about to release a mod kit for Last Oasis, which is something that we hope will give players the ability to change the game themselves. And if Bellwright does well, we actually have bigger plans to go back to Last Oasis and fix it in various ways. This is the state we’re in with Bellwright. I can understand everyone who says that we have not handled it well and I’m pretty sure we have not handled it perfectly. I will absolutely admit that. But I do think we’ve tried our best. We’ve made the best decisions based on the information that we had and we are about to see if it worked out or not because I think Bellwright is really quite unique. For any fan, if you’re disappointed and don’t want to look into Bellwright, I totally understand that. I think we made a good game, and if you feel you do not trust us, then that’s just how it is, and we’re working hard to gain that trust back.”
