New action-RPG with 93% positive rating lands on Steam with launch discount in tow

If you’ve spent the last twenty years wondering why nobody made another game like Parasite Eve, your wait might have just ended. Solo developer Ryan (Dead Right Games) dropped Wicked Seed on January 23, and it’s this weird mix of old-school Resident Evil-style exploration mechanic and tactical RPG combat. You. the player. plays as Ella, a PI looking for her brother in a Maine forest that has definitely seen better days. The game doesn't just want you to shoot things; it wants you to calculate the trajectory of your shotgun blast in slow motion.

The combat in this game is not a standard turn-based snooze. It uses a "hybrid" system where you move, dodge, and parry in real-time like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but as soon as you open your command menu, the world slows down. You spend stamina to queue up attacks, which recharges over time. The strategy comes from the "Bestiary" system: every monster has a specific weak point. If you exploit it enough times, you unlock permanent stat boosts for Ella. It turns the usual survival horror "run away" instinct into a "hunt for bonuses" mechanic.

Most of the early praise is directed towards the sheer amount of "stuff" to do. There are over 50 unlockable costumes (all earned by playing, not buying) and a layered weapon modding system. You can take a basic pistol and overhaul it with scavenged parts until it’s a crazy powerful machine. Wicked Seed also shipped with a built-in Randomizer and New Game Plus, so once you finish the 13-hour story, you can reshuffle the item and enemy placements to jump into a fresh run.

Despite the retro design of the game, the requirements are surprisingly high. You need 16 GB of RAM just to get in the door, and the dev recommends 32 GB if you want to crank the settings. On the Steam Deck (curr. $665 on Amazon for the 512 GB/OLED variant), it’s "Playable," but don’t expect 60 FPS out of the box. You’ll need to drop the resolution to 900 x 600 and set a 45 Hz limit to avoid the frame drops that are pretty common in the larger forest areas. It’s a bit unoptimized for a solo project, but the 93% "Very Positive" rating is a clear indicator that most people are happy to look past the unoptimized elements for the sake of the gameplay and pretty much everything else.

You can find out more over on Wicked Seed's Steam store page, where you can buy it for $15.99 after a 20% launch discount.