Sci-Fi Time Loop Adventure Forgotten 23 Coming to Steam July 18

Survive. Repair. Repeat. Can you break the loop?

[Poland – June 27, 2025] –  Prepare to relive the same doomed day again and again. Solo development studio KovalGames, in partnership with publishing platform indie.io, is thrilled to announce the official release date for Forgotten 23, a sci-fi survival adventure puzzle game wrapped in a time-loop mystery. The game launches on Steam  July 18, 2025.

A distress signal echoes from The Forgotten, a remote space station in decaying orbit above Proxima Centauri b. When engineer Max Novak arrives aboard a rescue ship, he finds the crew missing, and just 23 minutes until the station crashes into the planet’s surface. As he scrambles to prevent the catastrophe, time resets. Now trapped in a relentless loop, Max must navigate a shifting, hostile station to uncover what happened, repair critical systems, and stop an unseemly, unstoppable end.

Built around a tightly structured 23-minute time loop, Forgotten 23 tasks players with mastering the station’s evolving layout, solving intricate puzzles, and crafting critical tools from limited resources. Whether debugging malfunctioning robots, sealing toxic air leaks, or repairing broken modules, every second counts. Through corrupted data logs, personal belongings, and haunting environmental clues, players will piece together the lives, fears, and secrets of the missing crew. Discoveries that may have driven them to madness, or worse.

With each reset, the station changes, subtly at first, but enough to raise the question: is time repeating, or is reality itself unraveling? Rooms shift. Systems behave unpredictably. And at the heart of it all is Luna, the station’s AI: calm, efficient, and maybe not entirely honest. Is she protecting Max? Helping him? Or guiding him toward something much darker?

With no combat and no clear enemy, the tension in Forgotten 23 comes from confronting the station’s shifting anomalies, glitches, malfunctions, and forces that defy explanation. It’s constant, internal, and psychological. Drawing inspiration from the science fiction of Stanisław Lem, the game presents a uniquely Polish take on the genre, philosophical, unsettling, and full of unknowable forces. In space, truth is subjective. And some answers are better left buried.

“Forgotten 23 has been an incredible adventure for me,” said Lucas S. Kowal, the solo developer behind KovalGames. “I’d spend my weekdays at my full-time job, then come home every evening—and every weekend—to build this game. From the first idea to the drawings, the station design, the characters, the story, the dialogue... everything came together piece by piece, powered by sleepless nights and way too much coffee. Now that it’s finished, I feel an incredible sense of pride. I made something from scratch—just me, start to finish—for you. For the players.”

Players can prepare to enter the loop and uncover the station’s buried truths by wishlisting Forgotten 23 today on Steam. For transmissions from orbit and updates from the edge of the unknown, follow KovalGames on X/Twitter as launch day approaches.

ABOUT KOVALGAMES

KovalGames is the solo studio of Lucas S. Kowal, a Polish game developer, designer, and programmer dedicated to creating original, self-developed games. Experienced in graphic design, board game design, online and video games development, Lucas has been working as a graphic designer and programmer since 2000 and in the gaming industry since 2010, working independently in all areas of development—from coding and UI to visual design. His daughter, also part of the games industry, contributes drawings and artwork to KovalGames projects, including Forgotten 23. Find out more on the developer's official website. 

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