The Confirmed Facts
- Episode 4 exists as a plan: it continues Episode 3: Decay directly from its cliffhanger ending.
- It is in development alongside the Burial branch of Episode 3.
- Kit9 Studio has announced no release date, window or year for it.
- When it releases, it arrives as a free update to the Steam game for all owners.
- The only official news channel is the game's Steam page.
Notice what kind of facts those are: structural, not temporal. The community knows a great deal about what Episode 4 is and almost nothing about when it is. Every website that fills that gap with a specific date is writing fiction and dating it, and the fiction gets more detailed every month because detail is what the search rewards.
What Episode 4 Has to Do
Decay Part 1 ends mid-fall: a main ending that is openly a cliffhanger, a demon whose prices are still unpaid, a Julia thread left loaded, and two siblings mid-destruction. Episode 4 inherits all of it. It is not a victory lap or an epilogue — it is the landing for the longest episode the game has produced, carrying saves forward from an ending designed to be continued.
That workload is part of why no date exists. Decay took the longest production gap in the game's history and still shipped as 'Part 1' of its branch. A team that splits an episode rather than ship it thin is a team that will not be hurried by a calendar it never promised you — frustrating, consistent, and, given the alternative, probably correct.
How Progress Reports Work (And How to Read Them)
Kit9 Studio communicates through Steam news posts: progress reports that describe what is being worked on — writing, art, implementation — in deliberately date-free terms. Read them for substance, not schedule. A report heavy on art production means something different from one heavy on scripting, and the community has learned to read those tea leaves with reasonable accuracy while knowing they are, in the end, tea leaves.
What a progress report has never contained, for any episode of this game, is a release date given far in advance. Decay itself arrived on April 1, 2025 with the kind of notice this developer gives: close to the event. Expect Episode 4 the same way — real news will be a Steam announcement, it will be soon after the announcement, and it will not be preceded by a countdown on a fan site, because the developer does not run countdowns.
The Fakes: A Field Guide
- Countdown timers — the developer has never run one. Every timer is invented and resets when it expires.
- 'Leaked' roadmap images — no roadmap has ever been published; leaks of unpublished things are just images.
- Precise dates on download blogs — written to capture this search. Check their other claims (engine, price, free downloads) and watch them fail.
- Videos announcing dates from 'devlogs' — the devlogs contain no dates. The video is the product, not the news.
The one-line test that filters all of it: if it is real, it is on Steam. Everything else is commentary wearing a press release's clothes — including, we happily admit, this post, whose only advantage is that it tells you so.
What To Do While Waiting
Play Decay if you have not — six hours, four dead ends, and the save Episode 4 will want from you. Keep that save, plus your pre-finale Episode 2 save for Burial. If you are new, the download hub gets you the whole current game free, with Episode 4 arriving free whenever it lands. The wait for this developer has historically been long and the delivery, when it comes, has historically been the biggest thing they have shipped. Plan for both halves of that sentence.
Reading the Developer's Silence Correctly
There is a skill this fandom had to learn, and new players keep re-learning it the hard way: Kit9 Studio's silence is not a signal. This developer communicates rarely, briefly and close to events — a pattern set long before Episode 4, visible in how Decay itself arrived. Silence between progress reports has never meant cancellation, trouble or secrecy about a date; it has only ever meant that a very small team is working instead of posting. The projects that die go silent forever; this one goes silent for months and then ships the largest episode in its history.
Calibrate accordingly. Check the Steam page when you want news — monthly is a sane rhythm — and let the rest be anticipation, which this community has turned into an art form anyway. The theories, the fan art and the route wars are not what the fandom does instead of the game. At this point, with two releases still to come, they are a substantial part of what the game is.