Hero image: Rockbeasts. Image: Lichthund
Critical Role has joined Rockbeasts as its publishing partner — and Matthew Mercer and Sam Riegel are joining the cast. Developer Lichthund announced the deal in a PlayStation Blog post at 4am AEDT on Friday 9 October.
Creative director and co-CEO Bartosz Pieczonka writes that “Lichthund is partnering with Critical Role, both creatively and on the publishing side.” He says the partnership is what “should let Rockbeasts become the game we always wanted it to be, instead of the game we had to settle for.”
The post also gives the launch window — “Rockbeasts launches on PS5 in January 2027” — and says the two actors will be “officially joining Rockbeasts’s cast”. It names no day in January, and no price.
Pieczonka describes the game as a rock and roll management RPG. The player is not the frontman or the drummer, but the manager, taking a band “from a garage full of ego, feedback, and half-finished songs” to the biggest stages.
On PC, the Steam page lists the January 2027 window for Windows, with Lichthund as developer and Lichthund and Critical Role as publishers. It shows no price yet, so there is no Australian price to report.
A free demo has been on Steam since 8 October. The store page sets the game in the 1990s, with a grunge band and an alternative America of anthropomorphic characters.
Pieczonka says games “driven by feeling rather than formula” are “harder to pitch, harder to categorize, harder to put in front of the people who’d actually love them”. With the right support, he writes, the game “could become something much bigger than what we could build alone.”
Source: PlayStation Blog – Critical Role joins Rockbeasts, launching January 2027, Steam – ROCKBEASTS