Dearest players + wishlisters! THANK YOU. Holy moly what a launch week.

First, if you would be so kind, please nominate us for the "Sit Back and Relax Award" category in the Steam Awards. Or whatever other categories you want. If you feel like it. Link Here.

Thanks. Okay, on to the launch stuff.

Launch Recap

The night before the launch I set 2 alarms to make sure I didn't sleep past our 5am launch. I slept about 2 hours before I started waking up thinking I'd missed it.

So I just got up, and we prepared for the release. At about 4:52am we pressed the scary green "Release Now" button.

The 3 of us who were awake at the time made peace with our god/s and RELEASED IT.

To our amazement, pretty much everything went well. You guys turned up in droves to buy + review the game, our Discord blew up, the Reddit post made it to the top of r/gaming...

I think the thing we're most proud of is the review score. At the time I'm writing this, we're at 98% positive with 1,141 reviews, after 6 days. Whaa?! That's so crazy.

Updates + Next Steps

I'm proud to say we've already shipped 2 updates. These fixed a variety of bugs and improved performance on mission 10.

Already Fixed

Hotfix 1 and Hotfix 2 fixed the below issues.

• Fix: Improved performance in Mission 10: Data Harvesting.

• Fix: Improved performance of jet enemy on all missions

• Fix: When rescuing or delivering people made them invulnerable to prevent accidental deaths when dropping them

• Fix: Tweaked volume and frequency of scientist barks

• Fix: Fixed how instructions were shown for controls that have positive and negative axis (ex: altitude control)

• Fix: Made chickens a priority target for the rope

• Fix: Fixed ally npcs entering the van and breaking the objectives (Data Harvesting)

• Fix: Fixed dialog overlap in dialog when killing humvee (Tail Risk)

• Fix: Fixed music in The Battle of Big Rocks

• Fix: Added explicit drop zone in The Long Way Home

• Fix: Fixed some texts that were using a font without support for localization

• Fix: Fixed main fonts using fallback for cyrilic characters

• Fix: Added code to prevent issues when the options or savegame can't be loaded

• Fix: Fixed gas tank from "An Odd Tool for Odd Jobs" that was not blowing up when using the Easy of Custom difficulty options to lower Ally damage.

We are hard at work addressing all of your feedback, so keep it coming.

Near Term Fixes

Below is a list of some of the things we are planning to address in the near future.

• Changes to get the Steam Deck certification

• Cloud save

• Various logic issues in missions

  • Convoy mission bridge fix (no spoilers lol)

  • Some issues with rescuing NPCs

  • Issue w missile crate in "Holding Out For a Hero" mission

• Instructions for the "come-back shield"

• Instructions for switching missiles

• Better feedback when you try to shoot missiles but are out of ammo

• Various small weapon / helo price + stat tweaks

• Minigun overheat changes

  • force a cool down, don't penalize player from clicking when weapon is overheated

• Small performance improvements (bigger ones coming later)

• Various bug fixes

Chapter 1a

We aim to ship Chapter 1a before Christmas. This includes:

• Bug fixes

• Expanded test flight area

• Comanche helo added

• Balance adjustments

Thank You.

Thanks to all of you for making this a dream come true for us. We were joking the day after about how it felt like a dream- what if we woke up the next day and hadn't launched yet :) But really, it has been better than we even thought possible.

I feel very motivated by all the momentum, and the team is pretty excited to show you what we can do for the next updates, and remaining chapters of the game.

• Keep leaving us feedback on Discord: https://discord.gg/XmMTqEjpQg

• Join our email list to get more detailed updates: https://www.clearedhotgame.com/email-list

• Vote us for "Sit Back and Relax Award" on the Steam Awards: https://store.steampowered.com/steamawards/nominations/2025

Thank you! - Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team