ⓘ Steam

Bloodletter (not to be confused with the other Blood-themed game everyone's been pining for) has officially left Early Access on Steam with its version 1.0 launch today (August 17). To celebrate the occasion, developer Aldamami Games is offering a sizable discount on the Lovecraftian roguelike deckbuilder, dropping its price from $15.49 to $10.06 until August 30.

Players take on the role of a medieval barber-surgeon tasked with protecting villagers from supernatural entities. Bloodletter combines the roguelike deckbuilding foundations popularised by games such as Slay the Spire with a macabre horror setting reminiscent of Inscryption. Its medieval medicine theme gives it a distinct spin, with treatments such as bloodletting and trepanation featuring prominently as players attempt to keep villagers alive.

The gameplay is built around a deck of more than 80 cards, which includes six blessing and curse cards. There are four entities to defeat, each with its own win condition and three difficulty levels. Players can also use 11 different villager abilities and more than 10 Transmuters, which modify how cards function during a run. The game includes over 100 story snippets and 42 Steam achievements.

The game originally entered Early Access on March 30, 2026. It has ended about five months after the game first became publicly available. The launch also appears to have given Bloodletter a significant boost on Steam. According to SteamDB, concurrent player counts surged from the single digits and low teens seen throughout much of the preceding week to a 24-hour peak of 94 players. That puts the game within striking distance of its all-time peak of 129 concurrent players, recorded around its Early Access launch.

Reception on Steam is currently "Mostly Positive". At the time of writing, 79% of 134 reviews from verified Steam purchasers are positive, while 76% of the 13 recent reviews are positive. Some of the top negative reviews criticise the game for becoming repetitive over time, with players calling for more variety to keep subsequent runs fresh. Then again, Bloodletter is Aldamami Games' first launch, so there will undoubtedly be some growing pains associated with it.

Bloodletter should run on anything built in the past decade. Its minimum requirements call for an Intel Core i7-4500U, 4 GB of RAM, integrated graphics and just 5 GB of storage. There is no dedicated GPU requirement listed. Steam Deck compatibility isn’t explicitly mentioned. In theory, the Deck (or any handheld PC for that matter) should be able to run the game, provided it doesn't run afoul of Proton or other Linux components. 

Anil Ganti - Senior Tech Writer - 2984 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2019

I've been an avid PC gamer since the age of 8. My passion for gaming eventually pushed me towards general tech, and I got my first writing gig at the age of 19. I have a degree in mechanical engineering and have worked in the manufacturing industry and a few other publications like Wccftech before joining Notebookcheck in November 2019. I cover a variety of topics including smartphones, gaming, and computer hardware.