After three years of development, I'm thrilled, excited (and a little bit scared) to announce that Post Trauma is now available on Steam (PC), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. And if you're on Steam, you can also pick up an exclusive Supporter Edition which includes the game's full official soundtrack from Myuu alongside the base game.
On behalf of myself and Red Soul Games, I want to thank you for your passion, your patience and support of Post Trauma. Whether you've been with me since the beginning or you're just joining us here in The Gloom, I'm incredibly grateful and can't wait to hear what you think of the game.
This development journey has been an incredible ride, from the initial demo on Itch.io, to announcing a partnership with Raw Fury and re-announcing the game at The Game Awards, demoing at Gamescom twice and seeing the game be exhibited all around the world, from Tokyo Game Show, to being hosted by PlayStation at BitSummit and taking part in Fantastic Fest in Texas.
Our small team has accomplished so much and despite a few bumps in the road, we're incredibly proud of what we've been able to achieve. We hope you feel the same.
If you do encounter issues during your playthrough, please do let us know on the Steam forums. And if you're enjoying your time in The Gloom, consider leaving us a review and following us on Twitter.
Roman is waiting. Will you help him find a way home?
Three Days To Go: Announcing Post Trauma Supporter Edition & OST!
Hi everyone,
We've got some exciting news to share just three days ahead of launch.
In addition to the standard release, there will also be a Supporter (Deluxe) Edition, which includes the full Official Soundtrack from Nicolas Gasparini (Myuu) alongside the base game.
We're super proud of the amazing work Myuu has put into the OST for Post Trauma, so we want to give you the chance to listen to it yourself whenever you like!
You'll be able to listen to the full OST for free on streaming platforms, but if you'd like to show a bit of extra appreciation to the dev team, you can also buy it on Steam along with the game.
The prices are as follows: $16.49 / Є16.49: Supporter Edition (Base Game + OST) ~13% launch discount $3.99 / Є3.99: OST
If you really love Myuu's work, you can also check out the lossless versions on any of his platforms. Please note that until the release of the game only the Main Theme is available.
We can also confirm the full track list for the game, which you can see below. Post Trauma launches on April 22 and the Supporter's Edition is exclusively available on Steam.
Please be aware, there may be some slight spoilers for the story in the track names below...
See you in The Gloom
Roberto
Five Days To Go: Revisiting Classic Survival Horror with a Modern Twist
Hi everyone,
It's just five days until the launch of Post Trauma on April 22, and we're continuing to celebrate the countdown to launch, answering some of your burning questions about the game, putting them to the creator, Roberto Serra of Red Soul Games.
In this, we're discussing the importance of puzzles to the game, the power of a good soundtrack, the inspiration behind Roman, how the game builds tension and what Roberto loves about horror.
It's almost time to enter The Gloom - are you prepared?
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You describe Post Trauma as a Horror Puzzle Game – What is that?
In line with classic style of survival horror games, Post Trauma is made up of puzzles for you to solve.
These are designed to be tricky - hopefully just the right amount - and are a core part of the experience when you boot up Post Trauma. You might even want to ask a friend for some advice on a few of the puzzles. In fact, when we released the demo, I saw two people solving the same puzzle together and having fun with it. And during development, we purposefully tested the puzzles with friends - some people got stuck in puzzle A, but solved puzzle B in 10 seconds, whereas others solved A in 10 seconds and got stuck in B for quite some time.
But the hope behind every puzzle is that as soon as you figure out the solution, you say “ooooh I was overthinking it, this makes sense”.
We could have simplified all the puzzles in the game so no one got stuck, but then none of them would have felt rewarding to solve. That does mean, though, even if you love horror games, if you dislike puzzles, Post Trauma might not be the right game for you.
I believe games like these are making a comeback, even if in slightly different ways, but with Post Trauma our small team has purposefully designed the experience to look and feel like it’s coming right out of 1996/1997. But instead of opting for the pixelated, retro looking graphics, we’ve used modern rendering techniques to show what a present day interpretation of this experience can look like. We hope we’ve been able to achieve that.
Should I have a pen and paper? Maybe I can use my phone?
It’s not required but it might help.
Just with the demo, I've even seen people using screenshots, others using their phone, pen and paper or streamers asking chat to “remember this number for me”.
But even with all of that, we tried to make sure that all the relevant places you need to solve a puzzle are close by so there's not too much backtracking.
Each level is self-contained and the puzzles within them should feel like they're part of one big escape room, with the aim being to find clues around you to advance to the next level.
Tell us more about the soundtrack for Post Trauma
On the first prototype demo, I used a copyright free track for the credits, made by the amazing Nicolas Gasparini (Myuu )
A few people tagged him on videos and tweets about the game and thanks to that we talked a bit over twitter DMs. It was a weird moment for me because I was a big fan of his work since the early days of youtube and now we were talking about possible future partnerships.
After getting funding from Raw Fury I contacted him again because I wanted him to do something made specifically for Post Trauma. He is an incredibly talented composer and immediately knew the vibes I was looking for in Post Trauma, but more importantly he knew what the game needed more than I did.
At the beginning I asked for super specific stuff and he delivered, but he also shared experiments and things he thought the game could benefit from, and oh boy he was RIGHT.
I am super proud of the Post Trauma OST. It has the vibes I was looking for and more, it has inspirations from classic tracks but it still feels like its own thing and I can not wait for everyone else to enjoy it as much as I do.
What was the inspiration behind Roman?
When I was making the original prototype while trying to find a publisher, I tried out a few placeholder characters.
The original game idea had a young girl as the protagonist, but when Epic released a tool to make digital humans, after creating the first iteration of Roman and trying it in-game, it just felt right.
Roman is a normal person. Someone who, if you saw him on the street, you would not pay attention to him. He's someone that just goes about his everyday life, who does not know how to fight and therefore it makes sense that if he runs for too long he gets tired.
We wanted our players to feel vulnerable, to step into the shoes of an average, everyday person, and in many ways, Roman was the perfect vessel for that feeling.
What do you love about horror?
I really do not know how to answer that but I'll try. I think horror games have a cozy feel, I know that might sound dumb, but that is really the first word I thought, might be nostalgia talking here. Horror games (at least the ones I like) force you to play slowly, they improve your empathy by making you feel bad about the poor soul you are playing as. I also love puzzles and horror games are filled with those. But I what I love the most about horror is the community around it, nowadays a lot of communities have toxic fandoms, but the horror one is (for the most part) super welcome and full of beautiful people, I don’t know why but that’s how I feel.
What is it like developing a modern horror game?
It’s hard, very hard. There’s a lot of pressure now as the space has changed from the era we’re paying homage to. But even from when we first started work on Post Trauma. We just wanted to build something that is meaningful and enjoyable for players but that has taken a lot of time and effort. A lot of the difficulties are coming from the fact that this is my first game as a director and that our team size was also very small.
And again, this is a modern horror game, but only on the visual side of it. The gameplay is old school, I could have gone for a retro style, (and most probably my next game will be on that style), but for Post Trauma I wanted this style for it, and I am very proud of it’s visual identity, but realistic graphics also come with a set of expectations that are very hard to match with limited resources. As you can imagine, a small, remote, indie team, working on a game to try and make it look, feel, and sound like a big budget AAA release (also on PS5 and XBOX on top of that) presents many, many challenges.
Some people have seen the trailers and commented, “Post Trauma is the next Silent Hill!”, but let me tell you, it is not. Post Trauma is a love letter to the old Silent Hill style made by fans with limited budget, that’s also why our game has reduced price, that does not mean our game is short or bad, it is not, the price is to manage expectations, we are aware of the limitations of our game and I hope our players are too.
We also want to acknowledge the stop and start nature of the campaign, between the delays we’ve had and the sudden changes we’ve had to make. But it has all been to the benefit of the game and to always strive to create the very best experience possible. There are lessons that have been learned and things we would do differently, but we are very proud of the game we built and we really believe you will like it too.
I also want to use this space to say that I greatly appreciated the reaction to the demo during Steam Next Fest and I’m very excited for people to check the game out on April 22!
See you in the Gloom
Roberto
One Week To Go: The Team and Inspiration behind Post Trauma
Hi everyone,
With just one week to go until the launch of Post Trauma, we're celebrating the countdown to launch with several News Posts to answer some of your burning questions about the game, putting them to the creator, Roberto Serra of Red Soul Games.
Today, we're asking what was the inspiration behind the game, how long it's been in development, who's been working on it, and the games that left the biggest impression on Roberto.
Not long left to go - Don't forget to Wishlist Post Trauma if you haven't already and prepare for release on April 22!
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What Inspired You To Make Post Trauma
To be honest, I started the development of Post Trauma as something “just for fun” - At the time I was working at another indie studio, but I always wanted to do something of my own. I posted some screenshots on Twitter/X and to my surprise, the game got a lot of love. So I decided to quit my job and focus solely on Post Trauma.
I have always been a fan of old horror games, more slow paced with a big focus on puzzles and atmosphere over action scenes or big jumpscares. And as a hybrid developer - between an artist and a programmer - fixed cameras were the perfect excuse to make beautiful shots of any scene. I'm the type of player that, if given a good photo mode, will spend more time taking screenshots than actually playing. And in my personal opinion, fixed cameras can really work in favour of the horror aspects of the game.
How big is the team at Red Soul Games?
When people ask me how big the team at Red Soul Games is, I never know how to answer in a short sentence. So now that I have time, I will give you a long one.
Post Trauma started as a solo dev game. If you don't know me, my name is Roberto Serra and I used to work as a tech artist at Digital Sun Games (Moonlighter, Cataclismo, The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story).
Being a tech artist allowed me to write basic code and do a lot of the art on my own. There’s a lot of store bought assets that I had to adapt to fit into the style of the game, but of course I needed help if I wanted to finish the game.
Two months after signing with Raw Fury, in June of 2022, Pau Pujadas joined the team as a concept artist/art director. He is incredibly talented and elevated all the weird stuff I had in mind for the game times 10. I wish we could have included all the crazy concept art he did because some of that stuff is breathtaking. Pau's strongest skill is 2D art, but he also adapted really fast and was able to produce some amazing sculptures and organic fleshy monstrosities. And thanks to Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite, we could use optimized versions of those sculptures for the environments.
For the story I had a rough idea of the events that should happen in the game but I did not know how to develop the character or what to do with the world background. That’s why we contacted Cameron Suey to help us with that. I gave him some documents with vague ideas and story events and after a few calls he was able to produce an amazing world with great characters and well written dialogues. So although he is not a member of the Red Soul Games team, his contribution was very important to Post Trauma.
In February of 2023, almost a year into development, Andrés Montalvo joined the team as a 3D artist. He was a much-needed addition to the team, as Andrés was able to create actual good geometry for our game, and able to translate the 2D created concepts that Pau did, into amazing 3D models. He even designed some other great models on their own.
In July of 2023, we finally got an animator and Javier Alonso was able to animate our characters and creatures the way we wanted, up until that point we were using a mix of premade animations and procedural ones.
In the last year of development, a good friend of mine joined the team Francisco López, an Unreal Engine 5 developer, who helped me focus on other aspects of the game while he took care of the bigger programming tasks.
And not too long after him, Luis Monrocle, joined the team as audio designer. His work on the sound design of the game elevated the quality so much and made everything sound cohesive and oppressive.
Not to mention our fantastic composer, Nicolas Gasparini (Myuu) but we'll talk more about his work in another post!
That’s it. Of course, the credit list is way longer because we had help from a lot of amazing people from other companies. But the peak of simultaneous people working full time on the project was 5 people. And for most time during development, we were just 3 people working full time on Post Trauma.
What is the most important thing to understand about Post Trauma?
This is a very small, indie team - working on a game for three years - who have just tried their best to recreate something that looks like it fits on today’s market. We love these games just as much as you and with Post Trauma, we’ve tried to find a sweet spot that, we think, fans will appreciate. I think it’s important to recognise that this is a homage and a love letter to classic PS1/PS2 Survival Horror Games but we're just using modern day processing power and graphics to tell that story.
Modern horror games are quite different now - and that is a good thing - but sometimes I miss the feel older games offer. Post Trauma has been designed to feel like those older horror games, offering that alternative perspective we feel has been missing on the market for some time, and I hope you recognise that vibe immediately.
And just like those classic games, Post Trauma will not handhold you too much. The puzzles require some thinking but they are not impossible and will hopefully feel rewarding. The combat is simple - and there will be some jank here and there - but hopefully it's good enough that you will feel the tension, think about every item in your inventory and spend time thinking about your progress. Maybe even be a little bit afraid of dying and losing progress because you forgot to use the radio to save the game.
Or perhaps you will decide to restart a save on purpose because you accidentally used a shotgun shell on a weak enemy, realising that those are actually quite hard to find.
There will be puzzles, a lot of them, and you probably will need a pen and paper to help solve them. And while there is combat, the aim of the game is to build atmosphere through music, story-telling, setting a scene and making The Gloom and the environments Roman finds himself in incredibly distinct and unsettling.
This is classic survival horror re-imagined, but still a puzzle first experience. Our small team has done everything possible to try and bring this style back with a modern day feel.
Which games left the biggest impression on you?
A lot of them! It’s hard to pick.
My favourite game of all time is The Legend of Zelda, Majora’s Mask (The N64 version, not the more recent 3DS edition). The different ways characters in that game deal with their inevitable death was very interesting to me.
Silent Hill, of course, is a big inspiration. My favourite one is 4 and I really like how that game mixes fixed cameras with first person. But also after a few hours the game corrupts even your “safe place”.
However, I must say my favourite horror game is Dead Space! Post Trauma might have taken inspiration from all of those, because, even if I'm not adding those references on purpose, maybe my subconscious has because of all the games that I've played in the past.
How long has Post Trauma been in development?
The actual development has been exactly three years. I signed a contract with Raw Fury in April of 2022 which allowed me to restart the development.
Before that, all I had was a vague idea of what the game would be and a demo, which was made in a few months and somehow held together with duct tape and dreams.
But that initial demo got a strong reception, and not long after I signed with Raw Fury, we reannounced the game at The Game Awards. We’ve been building to this moment ever since.
It’s exciting, scary, daunting, and there’s been a few bumps in the road, but we’re excited for everyone to finally play the game on April 22!
See you in the Gloom
Roberto
Post Trauma will now release on April 22
Hi everyone,
We want to extend our gratitude and thanks for your continued support of Post Trauma.
As a very small team, your input continues to be invaluable and we deeply appreciate all of your comments over the course of development.
However, due to some unfortunate, unexpected circumstances, we need to push the release of Post Trauma back by a few weeks.
The new and final release date is April 22nd, 2025 across PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
We can also confirm the price point of the game will be $14.99 / €14.99.
This is not the position we want to be in so close to our previously intended release date and recognise the game's development journey has been tricky to navigate; be assured we don't take this decision lightly. We're incredibly sorry for any disappointment or frustration this announcement causes.
Thank you for continued patience, we look forward to welcoming you to The Gloom on April 22nd, whether you're playing on PC, PlayStation 5, or Xbox Series X|S.
- Raw Fury and Red Soul Games
TWO WEEKS TO GO! Watch our new Launch Trailer
Hello everyone
We have just TWO WEEKS TO GO until release on March 31! It's all starting to feel quite real.
Check out our new launch trailer just shown off during The Mix to get yourself in the mood and don't forget to Wishlist!
We've loved seeing your playthroughs and impressions during Steam Next Fest and can't wait to get the game in your hands in just a short time, whether you're on PC, PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S.
See you in The Gloom
- Roberto
Post Trauma launches March 31, Announced with a New Trailer!
Hello there!
Thank you very much for playing the Post Trauma demo during Steam Next Fest! Seeing your videos, reactions, and comments is amazing. We still can't believe all the positive vibes you've sent us.
We have also been reading your feedback and are watching the forums closely, so please do feel free to let us know what you think of the game.
But if this week wasn’t already exciting enough, we have some more big news - a release date and a brand new trailer!
We’re excited to confirm that Post Trauma will launch on Steam (PC), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on March 31st! That's less than a month!!
It’s been a long road to get here, thank you for your patience with us! We cannot wait for all of you to experience the full game and hear your thoughts about our characters!
We’ll be sharing a lot more information on the game in the coming weeks between now and launch, including pricing, but for now make sure to check out our demo and spread the word!
Thank you as always for all of your amazing support. We’re eternally grateful
- Roberto
Steam Next Fest Demo NOW LIVE!
Hello
We're excited, thrilled (and a little bit scared) to share that the Post Trauma demo is now available to download in Steam Next Fest!
The demo is from the beginning of the game, so you will get a taste of the puzzles, atmosphere and maybe a bit of combat! ːsteamhappyː
Keep in mind, we will save some more disturbing and unexpected things for later sections in the game but you'll have to wait till launch for that!
The demo is available to download right now and we're incredibly excited to hear what you think!
Thank you for your continued support
Roberto
February 2025 Update: Steam Next Fest!
Hello
Hope you’re having a great 2025 so far. Thanks for all of your support last year!
We just wanted to let you know that development is proceeding well on Post Trauma and we’re all working really hard to make something truly special. We’re not quite ready to talk release date just yet but we will have some exciting news and updates to share in the coming weeks.
For now, what we can tell you is that Post Trauma will be in this months’ Steam Next Fest! That’s right, you’ll soon be able to check out a playable slice of the game and enter The Gloom for yourself.
This is a huge moment for us. While we’ve been fortunate to be able to take Post Trauma around the world, from Gamescom to Tokyo Game Show, our goal has always been to share the horror with as many people as possible and this feels like the perfect time for you to see what we’ve been up to.
We cannot wait to hear what you think of Post Trauma and look forward to providing more details on what to expect ahead of the demo’s release. Make sure to stay Wishlisted right here to get all the latest updates. Thanks for all of your support!
See you in The Gloom very soon!
Roberto
Post Trauma is in Save & Sound - Main Theme out on Streaming & YouTube
Hello!
First, we just want to say thank you for the overwhelming support following our release date announcement. We really appreciate all of your messages.
While this was not the Halloween we had planned, we do have some exciting news to share! You can now listen to the full Post Trauma Main Theme on YouTube and Spotify, composed by Nicolas Gasparini (Myuu).
We're honored to announce that we'll be part of this years' Save & Sound! On November 5th, beginning 11am PST/ 8pm CET, you'll be able to watch and listen to the Post Trauma Main Theme, with a very special arrangement from Myuu. We hope you'll join us there!
