Stygian Software’s UnderRail was originally an Early Access title that launched back on December 18th, 2015. After graduating from Early Access the game has silently and slowly gone on to become a sleeper hit, moving hundreds of thousands of copies, according to Steam Spy.

The developers recently acknowledged this success, noting that despite not receiving any mainstream press coverage from politically-minded journalists, they still managed to reach a sizable audience.

In a Steam community thread posted on October 31st, 2019, the developer wrote…

“Despite having hardly any mainstream press coverage upon release, Expedition sold decently well in the initial wave and then kept doing well in the following weeks. This is very encouraging because this tells me that during the years we did manage to establish a big and dedicated enough of a fanbase, that is keeping an eye on the game and spreading the word about it, that we are no longer at the mercy of whims of individual mainstream journos of dubious gaming pedigree. Speaking of individual whims, we did in the end get a huge visibility boost (that translated into a financial one) from our friendly Ugandan YouTuber in the form of this video. Much love to Sseth.”

The video they referenced in the post is from YouTuber SsethTzeentach, who posted up a review of Underrail‘s previous expansion pack, Expedition, which came out back in July of 2019.

In the patch notes they also revealed that a second expansion pack is on the way, but it doesn’t have a name just yet. It will, however, put you in the shoes of a new playable character…

“[…] we’ll start working on another expansion for the game. This one will be a standalone campaign in which you’ll play as a new character in an area that will not be connected to the main game. We decided to do it this way for two reasons: first, because the base game is big enough as it is and we don’t want to add more of the big content chunks either horizontally or through further character scaling (we will be adding some smaller stuff through the content updates, though); and secondly, we want to be able to revisit certain base mechanics and design patterns we used in the base game and improve upon them without either making the game inconsistent or having to redesign major parts of the base game. We’ll talk more about what these things are and how we’re improving upon them in the future. […]”

The rest of the post is about the patch and what sort of changes being made to the game in the latest update.

More importantly, though, Stygian Software has made it known that they didn’t need the corrupt mainstream media to turn their game into a success, and it looks like they’ll continue to do so by connecting directly with gamers and bypassing the non-gaming journalists.

You can purchase UnderRail and its expansion packs right now from over on the Steam store for $14.99.

(Thanks for the news tip durka durka)