Smalland 2: Lost Realms Overhauls Crafting, Swimming and Climbing Before Its 2027 Launch
Maximum Entertainment's prequel adds surface swimming, freeform climbing and modular crafting in its first gameplay trailer, now aimed at a 2027 launch.
Maximum Entertainment has given the clearest look yet at Smalland 2: Lost Realms, releasing a new overview trailer on October 28 that walks through the overhauled systems shaping its sequel to 2023's miniature-scale survival game. The video, narrated by a member of the development team, doubles as the studio's confirmation that the prequel has slipped from a planned 2026 release to 2027 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2.
Where the original Smalland: Survive the Wilds dropped players into a single contiguous map, Lost Realms is a prequel set generations earlier, before the Giants ever arrived, scattering its tiny Vanguard heroes across several distinct realms drawn from European folklore. Each one carries its own hazards, resources and resident creatures, and the new trailer is the first time Maximum Entertainment has shown how players will actually move through them.
Swimming Turns Water Into a Shortcut
The clearest change in the trailer is how the sequel treats water. In the original game, wading past waist height was close to a death sentence. Lost Realms flips that: surface swimming is tied to a stamina meter, letting Smallfolk cross ponds, streams and ditches instead of jogging around them. Currents complicate the decision, since gentle flows act like natural highways that cut down travel time, while stronger channels can drag a careless swimmer off course and burn through their stamina fast.
Maximum Entertainment has been upfront that this isn't a deep-sea diving system; there's no underwater combat or exploration at launch. The goal, according to the developer's own Steam news post, was simply to make basic surface traversal feel good first, since even that modest change reshapes how the open world gets explored.
Climbing Without Fixed Routes
Climbing gets a similarly freeform treatment. Rather than scripted ladders or handholds, Smallfolk can scale almost any surface in any direction, a system the developer says is made possible by the game's tiny scale and physics-based logic. Cliff faces, steep overhangs and even ceilings are all climbable, provided a player manages their stamina along the way.
The trailer leans into the game's miniature perspective for this: leaves become springboards, tree roots become ramps, and the response from Maximum Entertainment's own Xbox Wire write-up earlier this year describes seasons changing which routes are even available, since a path frozen solid in winter can thaw into a new way through come spring.
Crafting Moves Away from a Straight Line
Progression is also getting rebuilt around a new Perk system split into four branches: Survivalist, Beastmaster, Wyrdweaver and Vanguard, covering mobility and gathering, creature companions, magic, and direct combat respectively. Rather than locking players into one tree, Maximum Entertainment has said perks can be mixed freely, so a build leans toward whatever a player actually spends their time doing in the world.
Crafting itself moves away from the original's linear unlock path toward combining ingredients with distinct properties, letting players shape a weapon or tool's qualities rather than just picking from a finished list. The trailer shows this applied to simple weapons first, with blade and hilt components swapped independently, though the developer has described it as a foundation they intend to expand once the sequel has launched.
Companions That Need Looking After
Taming returns from the first game, but Lost Realms treats tamed creatures less like disposable mounts and more like companions that need maintenance. Diana Carullo, Lead Game Designer at Maximum Entertainment Studios, put it plainly in the studio's Xbox Wire feature:
“You must bond and take care of these animals, and they will take care of you.”Diana Carullo, Lead Game Designer, Maximum Entertainment Studios
Neglect a bonded creature for too long, and it will leave rather than stick around indefinitely. It's a small change on paper, but paired with the new Feyfolk factions the developer has teased, whimsical communities with their own settlements and crafts that players can build reputation with, it points toward a sequel that wants its world to feel inhabited rather than just decorative.
A Second Delay, Explained in the Studio's Own Words
None of these systems are new ideas in the survival genre, but the October 28 post is notable mostly for what it admits: Maximum Entertainment is pushing Lost Realms past its original 2026 target to buy more time to refine what's already been shown. The studio's own announcement frames it as a deliberate trade, more development time against a launch date it had already set, rather than a response to any specific setback.
For a studio built on the back of a successful first game, in a genre where half-finished survival crafting launches are common, that patience is worth noting on its own. Wishlisting pages for both the original and the sequel are already live, and Maximum Entertainment says a firmer 2027 date is still to come.
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Mira leads previews at Gamers6. She has spent fifteen years playing co-op shooters badly and writing about them well, and she still keeps a spreadsheet of every weapon reload animation worth the frame count.
