Release date: Fall 2015 :)

But when will it be on GOG?

Well, we have to take into account that (afaik) GOG only wants to put completed games up for sale UNLESS it's an established company who they know will follow through (such as CDPR with TW3). So I can see their reason for hesitation.

In the meantime, keep voting for it on the wishlist!

I just saw the trailer for this game and it instantly caught my interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YmrdwgmM7A

Looks like Banner Saga (a game I like a lot) and appeals more to my taste than Convoy which reminded me too much of FTL (a game I don't like).

The GOG wishlist still has only 59 votes which isn't very much:
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/bedlam_by_skyshine_games


Watched a couple gameplay videos and read several reviews, my main concern is that this game is said to have "roguelike difficulty" which is something I consider a serious flaw in any game because if I can't stand something, it's unfair difficulty and random punishment that results in you having to restart your entire campaign many times over until you finally get lucky in games like that.

What's the general deal with all that roguelike repetitive grind stuff anyway? Does that give masochistic teenagers a hard-on? I'd rather fail a mission due to tactical/strategic fault on my part rather than factors outside my control, And I generally consider life challenging enough so games should be relaxing. If you seek challenge from games then you're probably not challenging yourself enough in RL but that's another topic.

Anyway, has anyone here played this game and if so, how bad is the difficulty really? I love the visual style of Skyshin'es Bedlam as well as the postapocalyptic setting and just watching the trailer makes my mouth water. But seeing as I didn't enjoy FTL, Steam Marines or Bionic Dues I'm now a bit more careful before jumping on games without knowing how the gameplay is.

Indeed. Their KS had a whole section on them being inspired by BS, and they even bought (?, borrowed?) the engine from the BS devs. Which I thought rather unfortunate, said engine having been built on Adobe AIR (ie, Flash). Perhaps because people who saw the KS also saw their attitude towards DRM-free. In case it's not clear, it wasn't exactly enthusiastic. Unfair difficulty and random punishment are two separate things. For example, the Nightmare difficulty in Quake 3 was unfair, but there was no random punishment. On the other hand, any game with random number generation features random punishment - RPGs, tactical RPGs, roguelikes, board games with dice, etc. I can't remember a single grindy roguelike, and I've played a lot of roguelikes. Grind means you're forced to perform actions that require very little effort on your part to progress. See any MMORPG. Roguelikes require more effort than that on each turn. I suppose you could make a case for repetitive, but what game actually isn't? Start a new game of Doom, and it's the same shit again. In that case, I submit roguelikes are less repetitive than other genres - after all, all this procedural generation stuff that's all the rage among the indies now? Guess which genre is the granddaddy.

That's too bad if they if they don't want the business of people here but I guess that's their decision :(

I know, that's why I mentioned both things separately.


Depends on how you define grindy. Imho, all roguelikes are grindy in the sense that you have to keep starting over until you finally make some headway. One could call it macro-grinding, whereas regular grinding (e.g. grinding mobs for EXP in RPGs) could be called micro-grinding.

I think it's more about learning the game mechanics completely and reducing the number of mistakes you make. In other genres, there is higher tolerance for the number of mistakes you can make and still recover but roguelikes are kind of strict about it, in my experience anyway which is fairly limited so to speak. And that headway you make is when you start to master the game mechanics which happens over multiple playthroughs, naturally.

I agree with all that but I don't think it's fun when you have to restart from scratch numerous times. The first couple areas/levels are soon going to start to feel incredibly boring and repetitive, even if they're procedurally generated. It makes no sense to punish players by making them repeat their whole progress up to that point where they permadied. That's the worst kind of grinding in my book.
I'd rather only have to replay one hard mission but not the whole campaign. Permadeath should be an option, never mandatory. Diablo has hardcore mode in which you permanently lose your character if you die but fortunately that's optional. The beginning stages of any game are going to become boring very fast so I see no reason to force the player to repeat that. It just comes across as a gimmick that caters to unhealthy OCD and artificially bloats total playtime. I would enjoy those permadeath roguelike games a lot more if they at least had an occasional save so you don't have to start over entirely. If one has picked the wrong skills/stats etc then starting over might make sense but if you had a good build and were on the right track but died due to an unforeseeable new challenge that you could have beaten with your equipment and stats/skills and the only error was not knowing how a particular new enemy moves, or worse, if you died due to bad luck then it's just pure hassle if one has to start over and repeat everything up to that one specific point where one screwed up.

Well, it's still not on GOG, but you can get a free Steam key for Bedlam with a $2 (or 2 Euro) purchase over at IndieGala! You'll also get a scratch-off card for a free game (every card is a winner).

I may finally open a Steam account...