Project Afterfall

A beloved series steps into a retro-future wasteland

Project Afterfall, launched into Early Access on 20 November 2025 under the working title Project Thea, is developer MuHa Games' spiritual continuation of the studio's beloved Thea: The Awakening and Thea 2: The Shattering. Where those earlier games built a dark fantasy world around Slavic mythology, Project Afterfall shifts the setting decades forward into a retro-futuristic wasteland where that same folklore now collides with broken machinery and the wreckage of a fallen civilisation. Players lead a small band of survivors, scavenging supplies, researching technology, crafting gear and recruiting new minions, while defending their growing base and exploring a procedurally generated map through the series' signature card-based tactical combat. Online co-op joins the traditional solo campaign as a genuinely new addition to the formula.

Cautious optimism from a game still finding its feet

The clearest thread among Project Afterfall's positive reviews comes from players, including committed Thea veterans, willing to judge the new setting on its own terms rather than as a direct sequel. One detailed review, from a self-described superfan with roughly a thousand hours across the earlier two games, captures that cautious optimism directly: "This one... isn't as good as The Shattering, just yet. But considering its brand-new early access state, it's actually a lot better than I expected. The worldbuilding is interesting, the core mechanics are solid, the quests are deeper and more fleshed-out than I thought they'd be at this stage." A separate reviewer frames the tonal shift as a genuine strength rather than a departure to be tolerated: "It is like Fallout, Shadowrun, Stalker (book) had a baby after a party with lots of vodka in old soviet block, to the tune electro music." Presentation draws its own specific praise, with one reviewer calling the game's music "SUPERB" and the art and menus "visually appealing," concluding simply that for existing fans "the game already paid for itself."

Longtime fans say the depth didn't carry over

Set against that cautious warmth, Project Afterfall's Mostly Positive score comes qualified by a dominant, heavily repeated complaint from longtime series fans that the new game is a meaningfully shallower experience than its predecessors. One of the corpus's most heavily upvoted critical reviews states the comparison directly: "Combat is far less prevalent since skill challenges are now nothing more than rolling a d100 against your stats. When it comes to the writing, they seem to have mistaken edgy for dark." A separate reviewer with over fifty hours logged echoes the same conclusion after finishing a full playthrough: "I loved Thea, and Thea 2, and so went into this with high hopes. But as the game currently stands... there just isn't enough to it," describing finishing an early run in roughly two hours with little incentive to explore further or take bigger risks. A third reviewer isolates the art specifically, praising the underlying drawings while noting "the colouring is below average. Looks flat and lifeless," adding that combat "has taken a dive from the other Thea titles" and now plays the same regardless of the encounter.

A disclosed AI tool becomes its own point of contention

A further, independently repeated complaint sets a meaningful share of Project Afterfall's negative reviews apart from ordinary sequel disappointment. MuHa Games' own Steam store page discloses that the studio uses AI-assisted tools to help review incoming localisation files, adjusting the resulting text to match the team's creative vision. At least one detailed review cites that disclosure directly as a reason for regret: "I didn't catch that this utilized LLM (aka AI) or I wouldn't have purchased it, but beyond that the game feels very much like a worse copy of earlier games." That complaint recurs often enough alongside the corpus's broader writing criticism to read as a genuine, distinguishing factor in how some longtime fans have received the game, rather than an isolated objection unrelated to the game's other shortcomings.

A rename that reflects a wider identity question

Project Afterfall's own naming history mirrors the tension running through its review corpus. The game launched into Early Access as Project Thea, a title that leaned directly on the earlier games' name recognition, before MuHa Games later renamed it Project Afterfall, distancing the release from the Thea brand it had initially traded on. Several reviewers reference this exact tension even before the rename, with one writing plainly: "TBH seems like they wanted to start a new IP and couldn't get funded or weren't allowed to whatever may be the case. This doesn't feel like Thea at all." Read against that background, the later renaming looks less like a marketing afterthought than an acknowledgment of a genuine mismatch between how the game was initially sold and how a meaningful share of its most engaged players experienced it, players who arrived expecting a third Thea entry and found something built on a related but distinctly different set of ambitions. Other reviewers frame that same gap more charitably, treating the new setting as a deliberate creative swing worth judging independently of the name it launched under, rather than as a broken promise to the existing fanbase.

Value

At NZ$28.99, Project Afterfall asks a moderate Early Access price for a card-combat colony survival game whose Mostly Positive score, 67 positive against 20 negative across 87 reviews, reflects a real split between players willing to meet a beloved series' new direction with patience, and longtime fans who feel its writing, combat depth and current length fall short of what Thea 1 and 2 delivered. For newcomers to the series or fans open to judging a genuinely different retro-future setting on its own merits, Project Afterfall already offers an atmospheric, promising foundation; for players hoping for a direct continuation of the earlier games' depth and tone, the current review corpus suggests waiting to see how the Early Access period develops before buying in.