Lost in Prayer News

Hey everyone,

As development progresses, the current demo no longer represents where we are with the game today. We will take it offline on Wednesday, 30th. You can expect an updated version next month.

Here is what we've been working on for the next demo?

All playable characters – our goal is to make every enemy you encounter in the demo a playable character.

Better balancing - More creatures in the game means it's easier to balance the game, so we're working hard on it. You can expect balancing to be fine-tuned at every step of the development.

Controls, commands, resolution -Overall improvement to fit most of your PCs and your favorite playstyle. You will be able to play keyboard and mouse, controller, keyboard only with an alternate control scheme for numpad, while supporting a wide variety of aspect ratios and resolutions.

Localisation - We've seen interest from players in Asia, so we decided to localize Lost in Prayer in Japanese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese. We were told to be careful with the localisation, as Traditional Roguelike has a very specific lingo so it might not be ready for the next demo version but we will implement it later.

Chat with us on Discord.

Thanks for your support,
Matthieu

To all Angels and Demons,

First off, I want to thank everyone who played the demo and who shared their feedback in our Discord server.
Special thanks to Dagger, who created an early-tier list of the playable characters in the Demo. It’s great to see you tried all the characters and quickly established which one felt the strongest. While Godly Terrapin was the most OP during the playtest, it seems the Bishop has taken its place for the Demo.

[h3]Introducing the Morality System : A Balance of Power and Consequences[/h3]

In many roguelikes and old-school RPGs, you need to distribute points in various stats such as strength, agility or intelligence to push your character into a specific set of aptitudes. However, often those stats attributions are obvious choices. The Warrior wants high strength for damage and a high constitution to trade hits. The rogue has high agility which is used both for offense and defense. The mage doesn't care about constitution and dumps everything into intelligence to cast all the spells, all the time.

We wanted to make the choice of your stats less straightforward and go for something that fits better the theme of angels and demons. This is why we came up with the Morality system.


The Morality System is centered around 7 Sins and 7 Virtues, each of which positively and negatively affect your character's stats.
The challenge lies in finding the right balance that aligns with your preferred playstyle. If you go too far in one direction you will face serious drawbacks that you’ll need to mitigate elsewhere.

I usually like to go for the Glass Canon road, so I’m fine with lowering my defense. I’m willing to sacrifice it for a better dodge and speed. So investing in Diligence and Pride works for me. Low defense but high dodge and speed to kill enemies faster than they can kill me.




[h3]Unlocking Morality Points[/h3]
Every time you level up, you receive three Morality Points, which can be invested into any of the seven Sins or Virtues.

As I mentioned earlier, I usually go for Glass Canon gameplay. Thanks to the morality system I can adapt my character’s strengths and weaknesses depending on the gear I find. Hence, you can try for your favorite playstyle instead of being locked in with a certain archetype for each character.

If you feel that your distribution of morality points is not working out as well as you need, you can refund them at the cost of one point. We’ll probably refine the refund mechanic sooner than later so it feels like a real cost and choice.




[h3]Gear-Based Morality.[/h3]

Most pieces of equipment are associated with a sin or a virtue, increasing its level by a degree proportional to its rarity. This means that every strong piece of equipment comes with a significant drawback to handle, such as a drop in defense or accuracy

For example, Kindness and Gluttony both enhance your healing capabilities. It might be smart to keep a Gluttony item with you before drinking a health potion. Careful inventory management is crucial as you’ll need to decide when to free up space for new situational gear.
Moreover, the shape of inventory space varies from one creature to another, which might impede your hoarding inclinations.




We know that while the Morality System works, we need to improve our execution. Some Sins or Virtues feel much more appealing than others. While the game is playable in the Demo, it’s the perfect time to let us know what you think about it.

• Are there stats you thought were too strong or too weak?
  
• Were there specific tradeoffs that would have made a more interesting choice than what we have now?
  
• Are there Sins & Virtues you always pick? Some than you never pick?
  
• What feels the most rewarding or the least appealing when you get morality-based gear in your loot?
  

Before you leave, if you’d like to take an extra step in supporting us you can review our demo.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3138110/Lost_in_Prayer_Demo/

Steam’s algorithms love to suggest games you might like. Leaving a review helps Lost In Prayer be discovered by more players. The more players who try the demo, the better we can see what you think and the more likely we are to benefit from more visibility from Steam.

Thanks a lot for reading the article,

Matthieu

To all Angels and Demons,

The time has come to play the Lost in Prayer demo.

You can put a few hours into Lost In Prayer before we start our Demo Livestream at 2 PM EST

Missed it? You can catch-up the VOD later on Twitch or Youtube.

DEMO CONTENT

- 8 fully playable characters
- 3 floors in Hell and Heaven
- Hundreds of pieces of gear to try out
- Up to 4k graphics
- Demo available in French and English


Starting today, we'll be giving out new challenges every week until you conquer them!
This week’s challenge: Survival!

Test your survival skills by surrounding yourself with enemies and share your screenshot on Discord



Go on the demo’s specific page and download it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3138110/Lost_in_Prayer_Demo/

If you like the demo, it will be very kind of you to leave a review, it helps more than you think.




If you can't get enough of Lost in Prayer, take it with you anywhere on your favorite music platform.

If you've played Nine Dots games before, you know how important music is to us.

The Lost in Prayer soundtrack is a hybrid of electronic and orchestral music.

Heaven and Hell each have distinct moods and instrumentation. The higher you ascend in Heaven, the more orchestral and violin-driven the music becomes. The deeper you descend into Hell, the more electronic and cello-heavy it gets.

Lost in Prayer soundtrack is available on Youtube and Spotify



Will my progress carry over when I buy the full game?

No, the demo build is a work in progress with more changes upcoming. So your save won't be compatible.
The demo is a work-in-progress version of the game that we plan on improving until Early Access release.


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When can I play the demo?

You can play it right now! We plan to keep the demo live until mid-March, but we'll update you on the exact date later.

A month should give us plenty of feedback to improve the game. We also want the demo to reflect what we’ve got in the game right now as closely as possible—frequent updates would slow down development too much.


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What has changed since the Closed Playtest

You can read a summary of the changes we've made in this post: article

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In what languages is Lost In Prayer available in?

The Lost in Prayer dDemo is available in French and English, we're from Québec after all!
We’re still determining which languages will be done for the Early Access launch.






This demo is a major step in our development process, and we want to take it with you.

Launching a game in Early Access—or even with a demo—is new for us at Nine Dots. We’d love to hear your feedback on what you’d like to see!


Join us on Discord

We can’t wait to chat with you about your experience playing Lost In Prayer,
Matthieu

The Bishop will be a fully playable character in the upcoming Demo!



To all Angels and Demons,

We thought it would be great to address our latest updates through confessions. Rest assured we haven’t committed any mortal sins, at least not while working on the game.

• We have sinned by making the game not ambitious enough at first. So, the release window for Lost In Prayer is now for this summer to get more features and content in.
  
• As a repentance, we worked on a Demo available on February 11th.
• We've added randomized events in certain rooms for you to discover in the demo. For example, you might find ways to exchange your gear for other in the armory.
  
• We have strayed from our original Purgatory HUB. While we loved having all the characters displayed there, it wasn’t easy to navigate and didn’t scale well. We now have a selection screen, but we’re exploring ways to bring back some of the previous HUB’s features in some form
  
• We've made significant balance changes since the playtest — more on that below!
  
• Lastly, we’ve improved the game’s visual style — more on that below!
  

We realized the game would benefit from better clarity and visibility in the environments.
So we made the following improvements:

• Reflection Probes : Improves light reflections based on the environment, benefiting both characters and surroundings.
  
• Split Toning : Enhances contrast between shadows and lights while reducing overly saturated lighting.
  
• Fog : Adds atmosphere and depth, creating a more immersive mood.
  

Here is the before/after showcase!










When you start Lost In Prayer, you will quickly meet Light the Angel and Darkness the Demon. We're taking your suggestions on better namings !

They will gently encourage you to storm their opposite side.


The character selector is now in a menu format.


Since our last playtest, we have been working on the game’s balance quite a bit.
The first floor is now giving you more breathing room for starting up your build before progressing to the next floor.
The first few enemy encounters can still push back if you are too careless, but the low intensity allows you to make mistakes and still come out on top. You’ll even level up a couple of times along the way.

And if you use this opportunity to equip yourself, invest in Sins & Virtues, unlock skills and then try them out; you’ll be ready for the steeper challenge awaiting you on the second floor.

Like any good roguelike, defeat is lurking behind every corner and you might need to get familiar with various effects, statuses, ranges, and cooldowns to survive, but there is still room to make both serious and silly builds viable if you keep on experimenting.




We will release a new demo version of Lost in Prayer on February 11th.

In the demo you’ll be able to try out the first 3 floors of the game, in both Heaven and Hell.
There are 8 fully playable characters

Most of the improvements I mentioned will be available in the demo except for the Fog.

We will keep you posted and will celebrate the launch of the demo with a live stream!


See you soon in Purgatory,
Matthieu

Hello Angels and Demons,


We're participating in the Turn-Based Carnival and livestreaming Lost In Prayer directly on Steam.
Livestream starts at 7PM CET / 1 PM EST.

I'll be playing the latest build from the game so you'll find some new elements from the Playtest.
It won't be totally balanced just yet so expect me to die, unlock new characters and try again!

Tune in and ask your questions directly in the chat, I'll be here to answer.


Matthieu