What 'Finished' Would Even Mean
This game was always planned as four episodes, with the twist that Episode 3 exists in two versions. So 'finished' has a precise definition here: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3 in both its Decay and Burial branches, and Episode 4, all released. By that definition the score today reads: three parts playable, two releases outstanding. The story you can buy right now is complete through Decay's cliffhanger and stops there - mid-fall, on purpose.
That structure frustrates players used to Early Access meaning 'buggy but whole'. This game is the opposite: polished but partial. What exists is finished work. What is missing is not polish - it is literally unreleased chapters of the book.
The Timeline So Far
- March 25, 2023: Episode 1 launches free on itch.io and builds the fandom.
- October 13, 2023: Episodes 1 and 2 launch on Steam as a paid Early Access release.
- November 2023 onward: Kit9 Studio publishes the game; progress reports appear on Steam.
- April 1, 2025: Episode 3: Decay Part 1 releases free to all owners - the longest episode yet, about six hours.
- Today: Burial (script written, per the developer) and Episode 4 remain in production. No dates announced.
Read that timeline as a pace: roughly one major release beat every year or so from a tiny team, with the gap between Episode 2 and Decay being the longest wait so far. It is not a fast schedule, but it is a consistent one - the game has never gone silent, and every promised piece that has shipped arrived as a free update, exactly as the Early Access page describes.
Why It Is Taking This Long
Three honest reasons. The team is tiny - this began as one developer's project and is not secretly a forty-person studio. The branching is expensive: Burial is not a reskin of Decay but a separate Episode 3 with its own scenes, which doubles the heaviest part of production. And the writing is the product - a game whose entire reputation is dialogue quality cannot ship filler chapters without spending the reputation that sells it.
None of that makes waiting fun, and the community's impatience is understandable - Decay ends on a cliffhanger, and Burial players are still waiting for their Episode 3 at all. But the record so far is of a team that ships late rather than ships thin, and most of the fandom, grumbling included, has made its peace with that trade.
Should You Start Now or Wait?
Start now if: you like character-driven horror, you want to be part of the live argument while routes and endings are still community events, and a cliffhanger reads as a promise rather than a defect. You will get roughly ten hours of story, two routes to plan for, and day-one readiness for both remaining releases - your finale save is literally a ticket to Burial.
Wait if: you only enjoy finished stories, cliffhangers genuinely spoil your experience, or the game's themes mean you would rather judge the complete work before committing. Wishlist it, and let a Steam sale plus a Burial announcement make the decision for you. Both answers are respectable; the game's own community contains thousands of people in each camp, arguing about it - which is, at this point, part of the entertainment. The download hub is there when you land on 'now'.
How You Will Know When It Is Finished
Real completion news will appear in exactly one place first: the game's Steam page, in a Kit9 Studio announcement, the same channel that delivered every previous episode and progress report. It will not appear first as a countdown on a download blog, a leaked roadmap image, or a fan wiki edit. Our Episode 4 and Burial posts track those two releases specifically and update when Steam does.
Until then, the accurate one-line status is: unfinished, actively developed, mostly released, and worth exactly as much as ten hours of the best-written horror in its niche is worth to you. For most players who start Episode 1, that question answers itself within the hour.
What Players Mean When They Ask
It helps to hear the question behind the question. Almost nobody asking 'is it finished' wants a development history; they want to know whether starting now will strand them mid-story (it will, pleasantly), whether their money buys a complete thing (not yet, and it says so on the store page), and whether the wait for the rest is measured in months or in the geological time of abandoned Early Access projects (months-scale, on the evidence, from a team that has shipped every phase so far). The one-word answer fails all three of those real questions, which is why this post exists at the length it does.
There is also a softer version asked by players who already own it and finished Decay at 3 a.m.: is that it, did I miss the rest, is more of this feeling coming? Yes, more is coming - two releases of it, one of them already written. The cliffhanger is a door, not a wall, and your save file is standing in it. Keep it safe and go argue about Ashley with the rest of the waiting room.