Huge updates are arriving quickly to Aether & Iron, and it looks as if there may very well be much more sooner or later. As you possibly can see within the new trailer above, a brand new roadside storage, new missions, and a brand new cube mini recreation are coming quickly to the Thirties-set Decopunk narrative RPG.
Forward of the reveal, which debuted completely at IGN Dwell 2026, I sat down with the crew at Seismic Squirrel to speak about why these new updates won’t be the final new materials we see from the sport and what gamers would possibly anticipate when it comes to future lore.
“Our recreation is constructed off the graveyard of darlings,” says Aether & Iron’s Narrative Tyler Whitney. “After we have been constructing this, narratively, it was much more bold [with regard to] the scope of how large issues can be. And the extra that we constructed out the sport, the extra we realized that we needed to trim narratively issues down in an effort to match what the crew was able to. And what was left on the chopping room ground is much more of New York historical past that I wished to place ahead.”
“At one level our Manufacturing Supervisor, Josh [Enz], got here in and killed two-thirds of the sport,” says Inventive Director Duane Stinnett. “So what we launched is about 33% of what we initially scoped. However you get a greater expertise than if we had tried to stretch it throughout a lot extra. So it finally ends up figuring out for the perfect.”
After I requested Whitney if leaving two thirds of the sport on the chopping room ground meant that potential sequels to Aether & Iron have been a risk, he mentioned he’s open to it.
“Look, you possibly can’t affirm something,” Whitney says. “We’d love the chance. Now we have an enormous backlog of fabric. I wrote an enormous wiki for every part. The quantity of world constructing that was written internally in comparison with what made the sport is a depressingly small proportion. So if folks love the sport, if folks need to see extra, now we have a lot extra to share.”
Key to the distinctive attraction of Aether & Iron are the retro floating vehicles (powered by the titular Aether) that are utilized in fight, racing, and act as a central pillar of the sport. I requested Whitney and Stinnett how they balanced the chaotic fantasy of Thirties flying vehicles with the inflexible calls for of a turn-based tactical technique recreation.
“It was a really painful course of,” Stinnett says. “The sport was initially prototyped as a completely free-roaming 3D recreation. We went by means of so many iterations how different titles dealt with turn-based three-dimensional flight with depth, and truthfully nothing was clicking. It simply did not really feel proper.”
“With turn-based tactical fight, one downside that we saved operating into was like, ‘Okay, how can we make them really feel like flying vehicles?’” Whitney says. “What distinction does it make? And so we actually tried to determine methods to [to make] the fight really feel distinctive. And I feel that is what goes a good distance in making the story really feel fascinating and compelling.”
“We lastly landed on an isometric view the place the automobiles are sure to those glowing blue ‘Aether roads,’” Stinnett says. “In earlier builds, they hovered over regular cobblestones, but it surely simply regarded like they have been driving usually; there was no sense of vertigo or depth. Now, the roads are manufactured from a gaseous, translucent blue mist. You may see proper by means of them into the empty air under. It allowed us to maintain the fight grounded sufficient to make tactical sense, however gamers can nonetheless leap in, cut up lanes, and make the most of automobile momentum to slam wreckage into enemy traces.”
And whereas the vehicles in Aether & Iron would possibly at first look seem like based mostly on actual ones from the Thirties, the crew confirms that the automobiles within the recreation have been really constructed from the bottom up by the crew at Seismic Squirrel.
“It’s actually an amalgamation of current automobiles that have been heightened and tailored to suit the narrative in no matter context they lived on the earth and within the narrative,” Stinnett says. “We’d’ve needed to get clearances to make use of actual vehicles as a result of [some of those] automobile corporations nonetheless exist to today. So [the vehicles in Aether & Iron] are kind of amalgamations of current vehicles.
“So for the Lowers, which is the bottom section of society, the working class industrial part, a whole lot of the vehicles are retrofitted to fly, however they have been floor vehicles initially. So you are taking a crappy Mannequin T or one thing, it is all rusted out and you retrofit it with lifters and that is how folks get round. After which by the point you get to the highest of town, every part’s kind of like Thirties constructed from the bottom as much as fly.”
Though the automobiles have been designed from scratch, there was nonetheless loads of inspiration behind Aether & Iron that the creators leaned into when constructing the sport.
“One of many video games that I first fell in love with was BioShock on my Xbox 360,” Whitney says. “I fell in love with the world a lot that I purchased the books and made up tales in my head for what occurred. After which Gangs New York and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, two films that have been instrumental in my upbringing, positively discover house in [our game] due to [their] romanticism. I feel that is one thing that adopted us by means of into Aether & Iron.”
Aether & Iron is obtainable now on Steam.
Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Occasions & Leisure at IGN, main leisure content material and protection of tentpole occasions together with IGN Dwell, San Diego Comedian Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He is spent 20 years working within the video games and leisure trade, and his adventures have taken him all over the place from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Comply with him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton
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