Hello everyone!
We are very happy to announce that Patch 5 for Ary and the Secret of Seasons is now available, along with Steam Trading Cards and badges.
You might be wondering why it took so long between Patch 4 and this update, During the last five years we were stuck in a situation where we had no control and were completely unable to update our own game, to make matters worse, the release of the game happened during the chaos of 2020, and we never felt the game was finished.
That wait finally ended last September when we got the rights back.
To be honest, working on this update over the past few months has been deeply therapeutic. It is our way of finally finishing what we started and giving this project the proper closure it deserves. We tackled a massive technical overhaul, updating the game's core 3D engine to the latest technology.
By jumping forward half a decade, the game instantly benefits from thousands of invisible, under-the-hood fixes. We also manually resolved hundreds of things that just did not feel right, squashing bugs, fixing memory leaks, and smoothing out the overall clunkiness. The result is a fundamentally smoother, more stable, and visually upgraded experience.
We are not done just yet. Over the coming months, we plan to streamline the save system, tweak the Muscari fight to make it less confusing, reimplement overworld streaming, and more.
So do not hesitate to reach out and share your feedback.
Thank you for your support!
Here are the detailed change logs:
Gameplay:
Tweaked dozens of zones across the game, fixing collisions, visual glitches, and other issues.
Disabled Thorn Armor zone damage when the enemy is already dead.
Reduced damage multiplier in Insane difficulty for a more balanced challenge.
Improved rotation coherence in the final puzzle room with rotating walls.
Add Extra tutorial messages at the beginning of the game.
Graphics:
Migrated the game to deferred rendering for better lighting fidelity and performance with multiple dynamic light sources.
Converted all shaders to support deferred rendering.
Enabled Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA).
Added subsurface scattering and hue variation to vegetation materials.
Updated HBAO for improved depth perception and contact shadows.
Enhanced atmospheric height fog with distance-based blending and finer artistic control.
Improved visual clarity and rendering of interactable objects.
Performance:
Optimized enemy AI logic to reduce game stuttering.
Boosted rendering performance with updated shaders and pipeline features.
Streamlined scene loading with staged initialization and readiness checks.
Automatically unload completed quest areas to free up memory.
UI:
Color-coded objective markers for clearer distinction between main and side quests.
Smoothed out loading screen transitions and progress bar updates.
Bugfixes:
Fixed save system memory leaks and corruption that could softlock progression.
Fixed the Epilogue quest not displaying correctly in the UI.
Fixed a softlock that could occur during the Winter Golem's final phase.
Fixed the Winter Golem's second cutscene playing twice.
Fixed Hyena boss puzzle mechanics not resetting correctly on player death.
Fixed dead enemies that could still deal damage to Ary.
Fixed Boar collision not being deactivated on death.
Fixed character physics errors caused by invalid transform values.
Stopped hero movement updates from running during pause or invalid states.
Resolved menu navigation issues caused by invalid UI selectable references.
Corrected ripple shader distance calculation causing inaccurate visual effects.
Fixed audio teardowns during scene transitions.
Resolved various stability issues across puzzles, dialogue, and gameplay systems.
Technical:
Upgraded game engine architecture from Unity 2019.3 to Unity 6.3 LTS (2026).
Modernized project configuration, physics APIs, and platform build settings.
Updated Universal Render Pipeline from 7.4.1 to 17.3.0.
Updated Addressables pipeline from 1.14.2 to 2.8.1.
Rebuilt the Addressables pipeline to fix a deeply-rooted engine failure that was breaking loading and could softlock the game.
Upgraded Wwise runtime from 2017.1.3 to 2023.1.18 (Build 8899).
Enhanced audio bank loading, music triggers, and prevented audio teardowns during scene transitions.
