If, like me, you spent the 2000s playing Piranha Bytes’ Gothic series,Asterfel is a name worth remembering. Why? Well, Mysteria Studio’s open-world RPG wants to pick up where Gothic and similar old-school greats left off—and the first playtest begins on April 17.

Say it with me: open-world RPGs are the meaning of life.

No. 😉 But I do love RPGs, especially when they actually have proper RPG systems. Compare The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind to Skyrim and you’ll know exactly what I mean. I’m not about to break out the old "everything used to be better" routine, because that wouldn’t be true either. Twenty years ago—or more—RPG tech was often terrible, or at least pretty clunky. But those games also leaned much harder into the role-playing side of things, and that matters to me.

In other words, I usually end up happiest with the genre’s old-school camp, and that includes Piranha Bytes’ Gothic. So when a German studio comes knocking with a singleplayer game like Asterfel, I’m obviously throwing the door open on the spot ("Get in—now!"). Because Asterfel is cut from very much the same cloth: third-person perspective, swords, bows, rune magic, factions, choices that shape the hero’s path, and all the rest of it.

Naturally, I’d love to play something like that right away—but, as usual, Asterfel’s release date still seems a long way off. You know, "Coming soon" really means: "This could still be one, two, or even five years away." Still, there is a bit of a consolation prize here, because Mysteria Studio has a playtest lined up for April 17. Tempted? You can request access via the game’s Steam page.

What’s Asterfel about?

When an RPG calls itself "old school," that usually also means you’re getting a pretty classic story setup. And that’s exactly the case with Asterfel:

You play a shipwrecked survivor who ends up stranded in the island nation of Asterfel. There, the king’s magical mines have, through sheer exploitation, awakened mutated creatures and an ancient god; nature and magic are spinning out of control, and even the dead are clawing their way out of the grave. The key groups in this setting are the Crown Wardens, the rebellious Kindred, and the magic-focused Scholars.

Right: those groups are, of course, the game’s three factions. They’re meant to define your overall playstyle, though it’s still unclear whether this will go the full Gothic route—where people beat the hell out of you if you seriously get on their nerves. Maybe the playtest will clear that up.

Other key features in Asterfel include character progression, meaning skill upgrades, questing, open-world exploration, and apparently mining and crafting too. The playtest trailer further down gives you a quick taste of what that looks like.

As for exploration, the official info says you can expect a world with different biomes, including dense jungles, arid regions, and ruins. In that sense, Asterfel does seem to stray a little from the standard RPG setting—assuming we’re talking proper tropical Tarzan jungles with swinging vines and roaring apes.

Looks good—but what platforms is Asterfel coming to?

That leaves one last question: what platforms will Asterfel actually show up on? No nasty surprises here, at least not for PC players—the RPG is set to launch on Windows first. The developers haven’t said anything yet about possible console versions, but they did comment on a DRM-free version via Steam:

"We're definitely interested in working with other platforms, if they're interested. I think the game could be a good fit for GOG at some point, but of course that is also for them to decide."—Mysteria Studio

That said, GOG is quite picky about what makes it into its catalog—and sometimes even very good games get rejected by the Polish platform for reasons nobody ever really gets.