Griftlands hits 1.0 as Klei turns its publisher sale into a festival

Griftlands
(Image credit: Klei)

Klei, the studio responsible for games like Don't Starve, Mark of the Ninja, and Invisible Inc., has a sale at around this time ever year. For 2021, it's turning that publisher sale into an event called Klei Fest, celebrating all its games as well as offering discounts of up to 75%. To kick off Klei Fest, deckbuilding sci-fi roguelike Griftlands will leave Early Access on June 1.

In Griftlands you play as one of three space scoundrels on a planet full of slug-people and dogfolk. Your goal is to survive and profit on a world full of bounty hunters and mercenaries, and both fights and negotiations play out as card games with a different deck for each.

Klei have proven themselves one of the better studios at using Early Access with games like Don't Starve and Oxygen Not Included. Griftlands has been in Early Access since 2019, and since that time, Klei's Kevin Forbes says, "We've added two additional player characters, dozens of new npcs and bosses, and hundreds of cards since then, all with the help of our community."

During Klei Fest a limited-time event called "Midsummer Cawnival!" will be running in Don't Starve Together. "Our survivors will be greeted by the enigmatic Corvus Goodfeather," Klei says, "who needs a bit of help preparing the festivities for his crow compatriots." A special course will open up in Hot Lava as well, pitting players against Lord Sludge for a reward that's only available during the event.

The sale will begin on June 3.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.