Warlord: Awaji day-one problems
Launch day, September 9, 2026, was bumpy. Within hours the Steam review score read 7 reviews, 5 positive and 2 negative — and the negatives plus the community hub name the actual problems: boot failures, crashes, a tutorial that freezes, and no key rebinding. Here's what's confirmed so far and what your options are.
The report list, as of launch evening
| Problem | Status on day one | What players did |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign won't boot | Reported in a Steam review within hours of unlock | That player chose to wait for a fix before continuing |
| Crashes mid-session | Reported by a reviewer and echoed in community threads | Save-anytime is enabled, so progress loss is limited |
| Tutorial soft-lock | One player hit it three times, then skipped the tutorial | Restarting the session restored progress — the game saves anytime |
| No key rebinding | Confirmed missing at launch, movement keys fixed | One player filed a refund request over it |
| Camp items unclear | Not a bug — the tutorial doesn't spell out all three required items | See our first-night checklist |
What the developers are doing
Darkmatter pinned an issue-collection thread on the Steam community hub on day one, asking players to log crashes, bugs, glitches and quality-of-life problems in one place. There's also a pinned thread on tutorial ordering, which is the devs acknowledging — politely — that the tutorial sequence matters more than it looks. For a studio this size, a single pinned triage thread is the patch pipeline.
Fixes worth trying first
- Verify game files in Steam (Properties → Installed Files → Verify) before assuming a broken install.
- Rebuild the camp completely if the tutorial won't close — the sleeping roll, resting mat and food tray all need to exist.
- Restart the session, not the campaign when the tutorial locks. Save-anytime is on by default.
- Check the pinned hub thread before filing — your crash may already be a known one with a workaround.
Your three options if it won't run
- Refund: Steam's standard window — under 2 hours played, within 14 days. One day-one player already used it over the missing key rebinding.
- Playtest: free, starts September 28, 2026 — a clean environment to test whether the game runs on your machine before paying.
- Demo: free during Steam Next Fest from October 14, 2026. Progression carries over into the full game.
One thing NOT to report as a bug
- Missing key rebinding is real, but the accessibility set is otherwise unusually deep for a small studio — adjustable text size, color alternatives, adjustable difficulty, playable without timed inputs.
- No GeForce Now or cloud version yet — that's a feature request thread on the hub, not a defect.
While you wait for a patch, the pinned thread lives on the official Steam community hub.