In the video game industry of the last decade or so, it has become increasingly common and appealing to talk about involving players in developer decision making, though what this means exactly can vary greatly between projects. In this article, we’ll discuss some elements related to eliciting, handling, and incorporating player feedback in Vagrus, so if you are interested in how you all had an effect on this game, dive right in!

Since World Art Day is today, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on something at the very heart of Vagrus: the works of visual and audio art through which the game’s world manifests. From the first sketches to the final brushstrokes, from the quietest ambient tones to the swelling notes of discovery, the Riven Realms exist because of the people who built them—piece by piece.

Like most years, 2025 has been a year of ups and downs, but certainly at Lost Pilgrims, it’s been a satisfying year full of releases and interactions with our community. We’re happy to put the year behind us and welcome 2026, but today we’re going to do a bit of a retrospective on the past 12 months or so. If that sounds like your bag, stick around. We’re going topic by topic, and there’s a lot to talk about!

We’re excited to announce that At the Heart of Ruin, the second expansion of Vagrus – The Riven Realms, is now available on Nintendo Switch!

We’re excited to finally reveal that At the Heart of Ruin will arrive on Nintendo Switch on December 22. It is the last platform to receive the expansion due to its longer approval process, but that extra time worked in everyone’s favor. Drawing on the wealth of feedback from players across all other platforms, we’ve been able to refine, tweak, and polish the experience even further.

Players’ reactions to At the Heart of Ruin are coming in hard and fast, and we’re delighted to see how our community is interacting with the expansion, providing praise, feedback, and articulate criticism, as well as reporting the bugs they find. Apart from tackling these, we’ve already started planning what follows – more on that later – and tying up some loose ends.

This week we’re keen to discuss one of the newest and most exciting features we’re adding to the upcoming expansion of Vagrus: Exploration Encounters.

How They Came To Be

While it would not be entirely truthful to say that the game’s development has always followed a carefully curated path, it is not exaggeration to mention that our imaginations have run boundless thanks to that, leading to a myriad of ideas and, occasionally, feature creep. We have, however, always felt that more Events to cover simpler matters – mining salt, random encounters, or procuring scrap, for example – would have a place in the game, even if their creation may not be the best use of our writers’ time.

Patch 1.2100717/21 Codename: Dead Weight(less)

Performance Improvements

• We optimized the sizes of several art assets, resulting in smaller install size and a bit quicker load times.
• Slight Companion Combat performance improvement against certain enemies

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a rare issue that caused summoned/spawned Companion Combat entities to remain permanently in your comitatus (no more parasitic Deadweight!).
• Fixed an issue that caused Equipment drag&drop to drag the wrong piece of Equipment.
• Fixed an issue that misaligned Gear icons with names in their list on the Character Sheet.
• Fixed an issue that prevented loading save files in Dissonance mode.
• General controller-related improvements based on your Discord feedback.

As ever, more is coming, so stay tuned, and conquer the wasteland!

Last week marked the third occasion that the annual Turn-based Thursday Fest showcased some of the best turn-based indie-games on the market. There were hundreds of participating RPGs, sims, grand strategy games, deckbuilders, 4X games, roguelikes, puzzlers, city builders, and much, much more to choose from. This year it was even bigger and more spectacular than the previous years, presenting well-known games such as Baldur’s Gate 3, showing that turn-based games are still very much “in”. 

Hey everyone,

While work on the upcoming DLC (or rather, expansion: At the Heart of Ruin) is ongoing, the team at Lost Pilgrims is also busy fixing bugs and adding performance improvements. This patch includes several of both, with some added love to controller support. We’ve also thoroughly optimized our asset handling, freeing up a whopping 1.5 Gigabytes of hard drive space.