Entropy, the dark fantasy tactical RPG from indie studio Lovely Hellplace, was supposed to have a smaller script than the team’s last game. It does not. Studio founder James Wragg says the word count keeps climbing because sidequests are, in his words, almost the entire reason he makes video games. For an Early Access title still building out most of its world, that admission says a lot about what actually makes an RPG worth a player’s time and money.
Entropy launched into Steam Early Access on August 18, with roughly a quarter of the finished game available: two towns, three dungeons, and a starting slice of a much bigger dark fantasy world pulling from Final Fantasy 7, Fallout, XCOM, and soulslike combat. Lovely Hellplace previously made Dread Delusion, a low-poly first-person RPG praised for side content so strange and dense it rivaled the main story. That history is exactly why Entropy’s growing word count is worth paying attention to — and why it sits alongside buzzy dark-fantasy peers like the “K-Diablo” ARPG Tarae: The Unbound on the watch list.
Entropy Was Supposed to Be Leaner Than Dread Delusion
Wragg has said the plan going into Entropy was to write fewer words than Dread Delusion required. That plan did not survive contact with actual development. Once the team started building companion characters and optional storylines, the temptation to dig deeper into every character and theme won out, and the script grew right back to where it started, if not further.
This is a familiar pattern for small studios chasing ambitious scope. A team sets a leaner target to protect the schedule, then the creative instincts that made the last game good pull the project back toward the thing that worked. For a business owner watching this from the outside, it is a useful reminder that creative discipline and creative quality often pull in opposite directions, and the tension rarely resolves cleanly on paper.
Why Companion Writing Is Where the Word Count Explodes
A large share of Entropy’s writing effort goes into its companions. Some are anonymous mercenaries players recruit and barely notice. Others are story-centric party members with their own backstories, arcs, and reasons for being dragged into the plot. Writing convincing versions of both categories, at scale, across a game world four times bigger than what is currently playable, is where a script balloons fastest.
This is not padding for padding’s sake. Companion writing is one of the clearest value signals in modern RPGs. Players return to games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or the Mass Effect series specifically to spend more time with characters they like, long after the main plot has been resolved. Wragg leaning into that instinct is a bet that depth in the margins sells the game as much as the core story does.
The Business Math Behind Loving Sidequests Too Much
Every extra sidequest is extra writing, extra dialogue recording, extra testing, and extra time before the next content update ships. For a studio the size of Lovely Hellplace, that is a real scope decision with real budget consequences, not just a creative flourish. Early Access softens the risk here, since the studio can release Act 1 now, gather player feedback and revenue, and use both to justify the time sidequests demand in later acts.
That structure is smart operator thinking dressed up as passion. Wragg is not just indulging a personal preference; he is using Early Access as a funding and validation mechanism for the exact kind of content that made his last game stand out. If players respond to the side stories in Act 1, that response becomes the business case for writing even more of them in Act 2 and beyond. It echoes a point Fallout co-creator Tim Cain keeps making about why studying what actually works beats chasing hits.
What This Means for RPG Fans and Small Studios
Entropy is a useful case study for anyone building or evaluating narrative-heavy games. Word count is not automatically bloat, and a growing script is not automatically a red flag. When the growth comes from companions and side stories players actually seek out, it is closer to product-market fit than scope creep.
For players, the takeaway is simple: an Early Access RPG whose developer keeps writing more than planned, by choice, is usually a good sign. For studios watching from the sidelines, Entropy is a reminder that the sidequests you cannot stop writing might be the exact thing your players end up paying for.