HELLCARD II deals a free demo and a February 2027 date
Skystone Games and Thing Trunk have put a free HELLCARD II demo on Steam for everyone and confirmed the four-player deckbuilding roguelike launches in February 2027.
HELLCARD II has a free demo on Steam, and Skystone Games has finally put a date on the deckbuilding roguelike's full release: February 2027 on PC and console. The demo is open to every Steam user with no sign-up required, following the public playtest that opened in August 2026 and admitted players in waves.
The sequel keeps the card combat that made the original work and rebuilds the crawl around it. Instead of clearing room after room, parties turn the pages of a pop-up storybook, choose side quests together and make shared decisions that carry consequences into later runs. Positioning stays the heart of every fight: enemies engage from melee or ranged distance and split their attention across the party, so where your heroes stand decides which combos are possible and which threats go unanswered.
New this time round is persistent equipment. Gear unlocked through play carries between runs, reshaping a hero's appearance, stats, buffs and the cards you can build around, which is a meaningful shift for a genre where each death normally wipes the slate clean.
What's in the demo
The demo includes the Blackmail Manor Adventure module and four playable heroes, the Sorcerer, the Berserker, the Paladin and the Cleric, each with their starting decks and equipment. You can play online with three friends or solo, commanding the entire party yourself. The full game will support 13 languages with full English voice-over.
The original HELLCARD launched in February 2024 and still holds a Very Positive Steam rating from more than 1,600 user reviews, which makes it one of the quieter success stories in Thing Trunk's Return 2 Games line-up.
Our opinion
Thing Trunk rebuilding the structure rather than reheating it is the right kind of ambition for a sequel, and turning the campaign into a storybook the whole party flips through sounds like a smarter fix for co-op pacing than another stack of corridors. A free demo is also the honest way to sell a deckbuilder, because the genre lives or dies on whether the synergies click and no trailer has ever managed to convey that. Clearing the sign-up wall so anyone can try the thing before committing is a sharp move for filling lobbies at launch. If the paper dungeons land in February, this could be the quietest confident roguelike of the year.