Wadjet Eye's Nighthawks Launches After Steam Wrongly Flagged It as Adult Content
Wadjet Eye Games' eight-year vampire RPG Nighthawks launched after Steam briefly slapped it with an adults-only rating days before its release week.
Eight years after it was first pitched on Kickstarter, Nighthawks is finally out. Wadjet Eye Games' vampire role-playing game launched on Steam and GOG on September 22, closing out a development saga that outlasted the studio's own release estimates by half a decade. It arrived days after a scare that briefly threatened to bury it before launch: Steam had quietly rated the game adults-only, cutting it out of search results at the exact moment the small studio needed visibility the most.
Eight Years From Kickstarter to Storefront
Nighthawks was funded by 3,934 backers in a 2018 Kickstarter campaign fronted by Wadjet Eye founder Dave Gilbert, whose studio built its reputation on cult point-and-click adventures like the Blackwell series, Technobabylon and Unavowed. The project was originally pitched for a 2021 release before a near-total redesign of its combat system, several rounds of rewrites and a swelling script pushed it well past that target. The finished game is written and designed by Richard Cobbett, whose previous credits include Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, with art from Ben Chandler and music from Thomas Regin, both Unavowed veterans, and Gilbert himself serving as producer. It marks one of Wadjet Eye's largest productions to date, a considerable step up in scope from the studio's usual narrow, dialogue-heavy adventures. Backers got a glimpse of why the wait ran so long in a Kickstarter update devoted entirely to reworking the combat system from the ground up, a rebuild Gilbert has described as the kind of change that comes only from being willing to cut work that was not serving the story.
A Nightclub Empire Built on Fangs and Favors
Nighthawks casts the player as a vampire reborn six months earlier into a world where vampirism has just been publicly exposed and, grudgingly, tolerated. Rather than hide, the player takes over a failing nightclub on the wrong side of town and rebuilds it into a personal empire through seduction, intimidation and a set of supernatural Gifts such as Mesmerism and shifting into smoke. Along the way there are ten companions to recruit, including a vampire magician, an incorrigible con artist and a disgraced private investigator, each with their own subplot to dig into. Wadjet Eye pitches the finished script at more than 800,000 words, fully voiced across the entire cast of outcasts, living and undead alike. That scale puts Nighthawks closer to a long-form RPG than to the tighter, single-sitting adventures Wadjet Eye built its name on with the Blackwell series and Unavowed.
Steam's Adult-Content Scare
Days before launch, Wadjet Eye discovered that Steam's backend had classified Nighthawks as an adult-only title, a rating that pulled it out of search results and delisted it in some countries entirely. Gilbert went public with the problem, writing that Valve was "under the impression that this game is way sexier than it actually is." Nighthawks creator Richard Cobbett was blunter about what had actually triggered the flag, describing the game's contents as "a few butt shots and some other censored naughty bits, mostly as part of companion romances and similar content."
The timing could not have been worse for a studio Nighthawks' size: with launch just days away, a mislabeled storefront listing risked burying the game before most players had a chance to see it. Steam reversed the rating shortly afterward, and Nighthawks launched on schedule on September 22 with no adult tag attached, though the episode had already spread well beyond the small circle of players following the game's Kickstarter updates.
A Net Positive, in the End
With the classification fixed and the game live, Gilbert struck a more upbeat tone about the whole episode.
“Now that this whole 'adult content' debacle is over, I think I can call it a net positive. More people know about our game than ever. I couldn't have asked for a better outcome.”Dave Gilbert, Founder of Wadjet Eye Games
The scare, in other words, turned into free publicity for a studio that has never had a marketing budget to rival its bigger-budget peers. It is a familiar shape for a Wadjet Eye launch: a small, close-knit team riding a wave of goodwill built up over a long, occasionally rocky development, rather than a marketing push.
Where to Play Nighthawks Now
Nighthawks is available now for Windows, Mac and Linux through Steam and GOG, priced at $19.99 with a launch discount running through September 29. Wadjet Eye also sells it directly from its own site, bundled with the soundtrack. For now, the team's attention is squarely on keeping Nighthawks' nightclub empire running smoothly for the players who are only just getting to walk through its doors, after a launch week that gave the small studio far more attention, for better and worse, than an eight-year passion project usually gets.
Nighthawks Kickstarter update! This one is about revamping the combat system and it's fascinating. It's wonderful reading if you've ever considered killing your darlings.
— Dave Gilbert (@WadjetEyeGames), September 1, 2025 on X
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Sam writes about small studios and the games they ship against the odds, and turns the hardest parts of them into guides that get to the point.
