Deep Sky Derelicts

Deep Sky Derelicts hands players a squad of three scavengers picking through the wrecks of alien ships for the loot, credits, and citizenship papers that separate them from a dystopian underclass, fighting through shuffled-card turn-based combat rendered in a distinctive retro-futuristic comic style. It entered Early Access in November 2017 and spent almost a full year in active development before reaching 1.0 in September 2018 — the storefront's own listed date reflects only that later milestone, but the developer's own event history confirms the true original release nearly a year earlier. Across that development window it built a mixed but substantial following — 72% Mostly Positive across 1,140 English reviews — anchored in praise for its opening hours and a specific, recurring complaint about what happens after them.

An opening stretch reviewers say genuinely delivers

The praise for the early game is specific and consistent. One reviewer with 47 hours invested calls it "my favourite turn-based dungeon crawler after Darkest Dungeon... The combat and card mechanics really wo[rk]." Another, after finishing a full 20-hour playthrough on a second attempt, writes: "it's not overstaying its welcome, the enemy and biome variety is just enough to keep it fun." A third specifically credits "the first 4 or 5 levels" as genuinely challenging in a satisfying way, "as you have very little early on and might struggle to progress further." That consistent praise for the opening several hours, across reviewers who otherwise land in very different places on the game overall, suggests the core combat and scavenging loop genuinely works when first introduced.

A difficulty curve reviewers say is just bigger numbers

The dominant, most convergent complaint in the sample concerns what happens once that opening stretch ends. One reviewer states it in specific, quotable terms: "Monsters go from having 15 shields and 30 hps to 70 shields and 40 hps. Monsters suddenly show up w/ 300 HPs. So stupid. Fix the power scaling in your game!" Another independently makes the identical structural criticism at greater length: "A rogue-like procedural RPG that relies on increasing the number values - HP, damage resistance, armour, etc. - of its enemies to simulate increasing difficulty. After finishing an hour long combat doing 5 to 10 damage per attack to an enemy with 200 hp, I was presented a choice between 2 different options with no explanation." A third reviewer names the same wall from a level-cap angle: "I didn't like how the lvl is capped at lvl 10. And things just keep getting harder and harder while you're stuck being weak." Three independent, technically specific accounts of the identical design choice — difficulty delivered through raw stat inflation rather than smarter encounters — is strong enough convergence to treat as an accurate, central characteristic of the game rather than a difficulty-tuning complaint from a few frustrated players.

What the achievement data confirms about who gets through

Global achievement statistics line up closely with that complaint. Early- and mid-game milestones sit in a healthy 40-59% range — most players who start the game do engage meaningfully with its core systems, unlock tier-2 content, and land multikills. But the game's ending-specific achievements collapse to around 1% of the playerbase. That steep a drop-off, this late in an otherwise reasonably engaged player base, matches reviewer accounts of a difficulty wall that turns the back half of the game into an unwinnable grind rather than a natural, escalating challenge most players can eventually push through.

Bugs and quality-of-life complaints that persist

Beyond the central difficulty complaint, a smaller but specific thread concerns lingering technical issues. One recent reviewer reports being "stuck at very beginning of first mission due a BUG that prevents moving," adding pointedly, "8 years after release, sorry, I dont care how good it can be." A separate reviewer raises a distinct frustration with the save system: a single autosave slot that overwrote progress they wanted preserved, with "no control over when it saves." Neither complaint is as widely repeated as the difficulty-scaling issue, but both point to a game that hasn't received meaningful technical polish in the years since its content updates stopped.

A development history that was real, then stopped

Checked against the developer's own event history, Deep Sky Derelicts received genuinely dense, substantive support throughout its Early Access year and shortly after 1.0 — numbered updates roughly every three to four weeks through most of 2018, each adding real content rather than cosmetic tweaks. That record makes the game's current state easier to understand: this isn't a game that shipped broken and was abandoned immediately, it's one that received real investment for about a year, then stopped, leaving the difficulty-scaling and residual bug complaints permanently unresolved for anyone playing it today.

Verdict

Deep Sky Derelicts earns its opening hours honestly — a satisfying scavenge-and-fight loop wrapped in genuinely distinctive art direction — before an unusually consistent, well-documented complaint about brute-force difficulty scaling takes over, corroborated directly by achievement data showing almost nobody finishes the story. Worth a discounted purchase for the first several hours and the art style alone; go in with realistic expectations about how the difficulty curve holds up, since years without meaningful updates mean it's unlikely to change.

Sources: Steam store page and appdetails API (release date, pricing, platform data); Steam's aggregate review data (query_summary totals, English-language sample); individually read user reviews, both positive and negative, sorted by helpfulness and recency; Steam's global achievement statistics API; Snowhound Games' own partner-events history from the November 2017 Early Access launch through 1.1 in December 2018.