Garden of Witches Early Access Timeline

Garden of Witches entered Steam Early Access on 23 May 2025 with a promise most Early Access games do not make: the full five-chapter main story was already in the box. Team Tapas had watched too many Steam pages stall mid-plot. They wanted a complete loop, then extra witches as extras. 1.0 on 28 August 2026 is that extra, plus a combat rewrite nobody asked to be quite this large.

This page is history. The live rules are on version 1.0. Do not copy loadouts from the dates below without translating them into imprints.

2024 — demo and Next Fest

A demo sat on Steam and Stove around September 2024 and rode Steam Next Fest in October. The scissors, the dash, and the “cute until the boss” tone were already there. Keyboard-only plus pads. No mouse scheme yet.

23 May 2025 — Early Access launch

Five chapters. Synergy tags at 2 / 4 / 6. Relics. Weapon variants. A gold-and-achievement meta in the diary. OST DLC on the same day. Peak concurrent players sat in the hundreds (charts later showed an all-time peak around 715). Reviews landed Very Positive and stayed there.

Press comparisons: Hades for the loop, Cult of the Lamb for the cozy-dark mix, Lost Ark for the action feel the director named in interviews.

Summer–autumn 2025 — 0.8.x and Maydel

Version 0.8.0 added Epilogue 1: the Swamp Witch. Maydel. One map, waves, a clock, Singing Scissors as a gift. This is the first time the game stopped being a corridor of rooms. Japanese and Korean creators spent a season posting 192-point Challenge clips with triple synergies. Those clips are museum pieces now.

A November 2025 roadmap admitted the original Epilogue 2 date would slip. The team was mid-refactor. Add-ons, a bigger Armory, fifty-plus new relics, a Charge system — the outline of 1.0 is already in that post, even if some names later changed from Add-ons to Imprints.

March 2026 — 0.9.1 beta and 0.9.2 overhaul

This is the funeral for old builds.

• Gold-from-achievements shop → combat EXP, max level 70
• Armory loadouts before the run
• Synergy / attribute / rune systems stripped
• Imprint system in
• Relic pool cut and rebuilt
• Map rooms retuned (imprint rooms, relic combat, fewer junk elites)
• Special Skill gauges flattened

0.9.1 warned that in-progress runs would reset. 0.9.3 was a hotfix pass (Challenge scores from 0.8.2 had failed to reset — they fixed it). If a friend still talks about “tag cap,” they stopped reading news in February.

August 2026 — 0.10 beta, then 1.0

A pre-launch beta in late August let people poke keyboard-and-mouse and the last combat pass. 28 August 2026 was the full release: Epilogues 2 and 3, mouse default, achievements, Japanese VO, launch discount. That build is what this wiki documents.

What to keep from the Early Access internet

Keep:

• Boss personalities and greenhouse / farm / swamp geography
• Dash i-frames as the real health bar
• Fireball as a carry (still true, now forked by imprints)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide video’s room cadence — still embedded on getting started

Throw away:

• Any 2 / 4 / 6 tag table
• Gold diary shopping lists
• Needle Shot rankings
• “Delete witch tags for Slash 100k” as a literal instruction (keep the Sharpness-then-dump idea; see Challenge Mode)

Team Tapas is a studio of fewer than ten people who used Discord and Steam comments as a database. The rewrite exists because players said melee felt bad, mouse was missing, and tags painted them into one build. 1.0 is the reply. The updates hub is where replies after 1.0 will go.