Expeditions: Samurai lands in Steam Early Access on 7 August, moving the series from imperial Rome to Japan’s Sengoku period. Campfire Cabal is targeting Q1 2027 for the full release.

The Setup

You arrive in Japan aboard a battered Dutch ship in the middle of a civil war and end up commanding its crew. The Steam page frames the whole game as three overlapping routes through that situation: stealth, diplomacy or violence. That is the Expeditions formula, and it is the reason the series has survived a publisher change and a studio collapse.

Campfire Cabal is the studio that formed in 2022 out of Logic Artists after that team dissolved, taking the Expeditions series with it and adding developers off Hitman and Hunt: Showdown. Rome was very good. This is the first real test of whether the thing that made it good travelled with the people.

Your Build Decides Which Conversations You Get

The dialogue screens THQ Nordic has shown put named historical figures across the table from you, Tokugawa Ieyasu among them, with skill checks gating the options. One screenshot has an Insight option greyed out under the line "You do not have the skill required for this option", which is the series doing exactly what it should: making the character sheet decide what you are allowed to try, not just how much damage you do.

A dialogue scene in Expeditions: Samurai with Tokugawa Ieyasu, showing three response options and a locked Insight skill check
Skill checks gate dialogue options, including a locked Insight route in this exchange with Tokugawa Ieyasu. Screenshot via Steam / Campfire Cabal.

The character sheet backs that up. Four attributes, Power, Finesse, Perception and Wits, feed skills that are as much social as martial: Skulduggery and Manipulation sit alongside Surprise Attack and Athleticism. Finesse governs stealth and trickery as well as crit chance.

The Expeditions: Samurai character sheet for John Flynn, showing Power, Finesse, Perception and Wits attributes with their component skills
The character sheet puts social skills on the same footing as combat ones. Screenshot via Steam / Campfire Cabal.

The Early Access Question

This is the part worth being sceptical about. Early Access suits games that improve with iteration on systems, and it suits roguelikes and colony sims especially well. A choice-driven historical RPG is a harder fit, because the thing you most want to judge is whether the branches pay off, and a partial branch tells you very little.

Steam also lists online co-op alongside single player, which would be new for Expeditions and raises its own questions about how a co-op partner interacts with a game built on one party leader’s choices. Worth a look on 7 August, worth reserving judgement until the Q1 2027 build.

Watch the trailer