Fogpiercer’s 1.0 Launch Is Being Patched Like Early Access

Mad Cookies Studio shipped Fogpiercer as a finished $19.99 game on July 17, then posted Update 12 on September 9 to stop a crash after Update 11. The post-apocalyptic train deckbuilder from the Bratislava team landed on Steam, GOG, the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass the same day, after Hooded Horse had sold it as early access.

Steam still files the game as Very Positive. The score that sits under that label is cooler than the one the publisher toasted on launch weekend, and the patch list now reads like the early-access branch that never opened.

Hooded Horse Signed an Early Access Game, Then Got a 1.0

On September 18, 2025, Hooded Horse announced Fogpiercer from Slovakia-based Mad Cookies Studio and promised an early-access 2026 release. CEO Tim Bender called the setting and the train-based rules a fit for players who already live in roguelike deckbuilders. Lead designer Krystof Klestil said the deal was a dream that gave the team everything it needed.

Joining Hooded Horse is a dream come true. They’ve been incredible from day one. It’s given us full confidence in having everything we need and more to make Fogpiercer into the best version of itself.

Krystof Klestil, Lead Designer, Mad Cookies Studio, partnership announcement

That early-access window never opened. The July 17 build went out as 1.0 at $19.99, £17.99, €19.99, or ¥1,980, with a free demo left on Steam and a Godot 4.7 client for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Critic Austin Gallagher wrote that the game had great bones but ultimately lacked meat, and that more post-launch content would have to close the gap. Erik Hodges said the core loop quickly becomes repetitive. Those notes, written around launch, are the to-do list Mad Cookies has been working through in public.

Steam Reviews Slipped From 91% to 83%

On July 18, Hooded Horse wrote that Fogpiercer had broken its first 1,000 players with 91% positive reviews on Steam. SteamDB’s chart puts the all-time peak at 1,038 concurrent players that same day. The official store page now records 83 percent of 591 reviews as positive, which Steam still bins as Very Positive, while recent reviews sit at 77% of 83, which it bins as Mostly Positive.

That is an eight-point drop from the figure the publisher posted next to the 1,000-player mark. The people still filing reviews are cooler than the launch crowd, which is what you get when the first weekend moves on and the players who hit the content wall stay to write.

https://x.com/HoodedHorseInc/status/2078526503105577155

LAUNCH VERSUS 54 DAYS LATER

Raijin’s September 7 snapshot puts estimated 15,460 Steam copies sold, about $185,400 in gross, and 53,266 wishlists. That is a 29% convert from the wishlist pile, thin for a Hooded Horse strategy title unless you count the Game Pass installs that never become Steam owners. July averaged 392 daily players; August averaged 102, a 73.9% drop, with an August peak of 237.

The Fun Is Shoving Bandits Onto the Tracks

The thing the 1.0 actually shipped is a grid fight in which the train is the deck. You pick a locomotive, carriages, and a driver, and those choices load the cards you will play while bandits pour in from behind. Steam’s own store copy puts more than 170 cards in the box, plus 50 achievements, a 2 GB install, and 16 languages. Action points are scarce. Enemies telegraph. The winning turn is the one that shoves a truck into a cliff, into a friend, or under the wheels.

A coal card plus an artillery shot can park an enemy on the rails so the locomotive finishes the job. The same shot can pop a lead vehicle and send it tumbling through the convoy behind it. That pile-up fantasy is the reason the Steam page worked in 2024, when Klestil posted the first trailer and called the combat highly positional, in the Into the Breach sense, and it is still the reason a run is worth starting.

Fogpiercer has a great setting and innovative train-based gameplay, we think fans of roguelike deckbuilders are going to love this one. We’re honored to be serving as their publisher.

Tim Bender, CEO, Hooded Horse, partnership announcement

The complaint that stuck is not that the shove is weak. It is that the opening hours repeat, the story is almost absent, and the first four carriages did not give you enough distinct ways to play. Handheld sessions on a Steam Deck or an ROG Xbox Ally X make the same point in a different way: the game looks like the last chase in Mad Max 2, surrounded and outnumbered, with the only legal move being forward, and then the map starts to echo itself.

Update 12 Landed the Same Day as a Crash Report

Mad Cookies has been numbering those answers. Update 12 went out on September 9 with Fog Thickness multipliers and a new main menu, and with a fix for a crash that started after Update 11 when players pressed Continue at the end of a run, or sometimes when they returned to the menu. Twelve numbered updates in 54 days is a patch about every four and a half days, which is early-access cadence with a 1.0 stamp on the box.

THE PATCH TRAIN SINCE JULY 17

1. July 20, 2026: Posts Update 2, retuning carriage unlocks, corruption mods, and several crash paths.
2. July 25, 2026: Adds 16 modules, including a new Tier 5, and rebuilds the train-building screen.
3. July 31, 2026: Reworks the Passenger carriage, adds cargo cards, and puts a hold-to-confirm on new and abandoned runs.
4. August 6, 2026: Ships Update 8 as a stability drop for the card-hover flicker, Ghost’s unlock, and Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian font stutter.
5. August 10, 2026: Revisits card pattern mods, the deckbuilding layer the 1.0 had underused.
6. September 1, 2026: Raises random encounters from 3 to 9, retunes map generation, and cuts VRAM use.
7. September 7, 2026: Gives Artillery, Protector, Minigun, and Harpoon 12 new base cards so the first four carriages finally play differently.
8. September 9, 2026: Ships Update 12, the Continue-button crash fix, Fog Thickness multipliers, and a dynamic main menu.

Update 10 is the clearest admission that 1.0 was thin. Freight Station, Garden, Hero Statue, Post Office, Rally, and Train Coaster joined the encounter table, and the studio killed the map modifier that stripped random encounters entirely because the gap between those regions had become too large. Two new music tracks came with it. The notes ask for Steam reviews in so many words, because reviews are how the team decides what to patch next.

Update 11, two days before the crash fix, is the other half of Gallagher’s note. The first four carriages got new cards aimed at viability and at fresh synergies, plus GPU work on the 3D targeting lines. That is not a day-one balance tweak. It is content the launch build did not have, arriving in the same week the store put the game at 25% off.

Cardbob’s 28 Reviews Were the Whole Prior Track Record

Mad Cookies Studio is four friends who founded the company in 2020, later fell for trains, and shipped their first game without any. Cardbob, a cardboard-sci-fi action roguelite about dungeon loot and haggling, landed on Steam on August 31, 2023 at $9.99. It still has 28 user reviews, all of them positive. Klestil’s own launch post said the team had spent a year and a half crying, laughing, developing, and debugging to get that far.

Fogpiercer is the jump: Hooded Horse’s QA and localization, a 16-language sheet, a publisher sale calendar, and a Game Pass window that Cardbob never had. The partnership trailer ran at Convergence in 2025. The studio still talks like a small Godot shop in the patch notes, greeting people with “Hey there peeps” and shipping font fixes for Ukrainian glyphs. That voice is why the Continue crash got a same-day numbered update instead of a silent hotfix two weeks later.

It is also why the 1.0 call was expensive. A 28-review debut does not teach a team how much map a $19.99 deckbuilder needs when it sits next to Slay the Spire clones on Game Pass. Hooded Horse bet that the train-plus-cards hook would carry a full-price launch. The reviews say the hook works and the map does not, yet, which is exactly the lesson early access is supposed to buy before the Metacritic window closes.

Game Pass Still Carries the $19.99 Train Game

The day-one PC Game Pass launch is the other half of the 15,460 Steam copies. Subscribers could play the same 1.0 without paying $19.99, on PC only, with no Xbox console build in the July 17 drop. Microsoft still has the title listed for Xbox Cloud Gaming on its play page, PEGI 7, controller supported. Early September’s Game Pass leaving list did not include it, so the free-to-subscribers copy is still the version most people will try.

That split explains the quiet Steam chart. A 30-minute Game Pass sample is enough to learn the shove and not enough to pay $19.99 for another eight hours of the same two biomes, which is why the store is already at 25% off until September 13. GOG and the Microsoft Store carry the paid build alongside Steam. The wishlist-to-sale math on Steam is the residue after Game Pass took the curious.

WHERE THE GAME IS SOLD

• Steam: Windows, macOS, and Linux, 25% off until September 13, demo still posted.
• GOG: Paid PC build at the same $19.99 list price as launch.
• Microsoft Store: Paid PC build, the other storefront on the July 17 press sheet.
• PC Game Pass: Day-one on July 17 for PC, still listed, with a cloud page on Xbox.com.

Update 12 is live on those storefronts, the Continue button is the thing it patches, and the 25% discount runs through September 13. The 1.0 Mad Cookies put on Game Pass on July 17 is still taking numbered patches, 54 days later, from a studio whose last game had 28 reviews.