Soulmask just hit #4 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart with nearly 25,000 concurrent players — a 98.9% surge that any survival-craft studio would frame and hang on the wall. The full 1.0 launch dropped April 9, complete with a 10% discount and Steam’s coveted Featured Win placement. By the raw numbers, CampFire Studio’s ancient-mask sandbox is having a moment.

Read the reviews, though, and the moment gets complicated.

1.0 on Paper, Beta in Practice

After 21 months and roughly 800,000 Early Access players, Soulmask’s graduation to version 1.0 was supposed to be a polish pass. CampFire Studio claims more than 1,800 optimizations and improvements across the Early Access window. Instead, the Steam review section reads like a QA backlog.

“It has went into full release with a ton of bugs and no polish,” wrote one player with 147 hours logged. “Some of the help screenshots are only in Chinese, the new annoying AI handhold thing has no sound and its text pops up and off very quickly so its of new use at all.”

Another player, barely 30 minutes in, called the release “very much just another game that’s full release is playing out much like a beta test.” They cited clunky combat, locked animations during fights, and a general lack of refinement in core movement. A Linux player reported being unable to rejoin servers after an inevitable first crash — a hard brick for anyone not running Windows.

The overall rating sits at “Mostly Positive” with 79% of 6,866 reviews in the green. Split the numbers and you get 5,457 positive against 1,409 negative. For a game that Steam is actively amplifying through Featured Win placement and Top Sellers visibility, that negative volume is loud enough to hear over the marketing budget.

The DLC Deal That Moves Units

CampFire Studio isn’t just selling a 1.0 launch. It’s bundling the Shifting Sands DLC — an Ancient Egypt-themed expansion described by PCGamesN as “as large as the base game” — for free to anyone who owns or buys Soulmask before May 10. After that window closes, the DLC costs $19.99 on its own, roughly two-thirds of the base game’s full $29.99 price.

It’s a sharp piece of bundling. Shifting Sands adds three story bosses, more than ten dungeons, four god-themed masks tied to Horus, Anubis, Sobek, and Amun-Ra, and modular airships that function as mobile sky bases. According to publisher Qooland Games, the expansion ventures into territory where “ancient Egyptian mythology intertwines with alien technology” — anti-gravity solar ships, desert traversal systems, and a “live-on-your-ship” survival loop.

Wrapped into a launch-week discount at $26.99, the package becomes genuinely hard to pass up, rough edges and all.

CampFire Studio has acknowledged at least one distribution issue: some Steam players couldn’t claim the free DLC at launch. The developer said it is “working urgently to resolve this issue” and noted that players don’t need to add Shifting Sands to their cart separately — the expansion should grant automatically after purchasing the base game.

Ship Now, Patch Later — the Genre Standard

The survival-craft genre has a documented habit of launching rough and iterating live. Ark: Survival Evolved spent years in Early Access before a “full release” that barely changed the day-to-day experience. Rust’s 1.0 in 2018 was essentially a formality. Soulmask isn’t breaking new ground — it’s running a well-worn playbook.

What’s different is the scale of the storefront backing. A #4 Top Sellers ranking and Featured Win placement mean Steam’s algorithm is amplifying a product that, by its own players’ accounts, still has untranslated help screens and combat locked behind unfinished animations. Steam is vouching for a game that hasn’t finished vouching for itself.

The 1.0 update does deliver genuine structural additions: three distinct playstyles (Tribe Mode for builders, Survival Mode for hardcore players, Warrior Mode for combat focus), a new Mask Knowledge Base encyclopedia, upgraded tribe management with automated role assignment, and a “Mimicry Ascension” system that pushes mask abilities beyond their original limits. The ambition is real. The execution is still catching up.

When your overhauled tutorial AI has no audio and its text vanishes before players can read it, the onboarding improvement becomes its own kind of obstacle.

The Verdict

$26.99 with a free $19.99 DLC attached is a strong value proposition. Soulmask has the bones of a deep survival sandbox — the mask system, tribe automation, and now aerial ship combat suggest a studio with genuine ideas and the willingness to swing big on scope. But 1,409 negative reviews in launch week, from players with playtimes ranging from 30 minutes to 147 hours, tells you those ideas are still wrapped in friction.

The 10% discount runs through April 23. The free DLC window closes May 10. The bugs will almost certainly outlast both deadlines.

Sources