If you bought Samson: A Tyndalston Story on day one and ran into stutters, mission-breaking bugs, or outright crashes, you are not alone. Liquid Swords' debut PC title launched to a "Mixed" Steam rating, with only 51 percent of its 646 user reviews recommending it as of today. The good news: a substantial patch drops tomorrow, April 10.
A rocky first impression for Liquid Swords
Studio head Christofer Sundberg had previously acknowledged that launch would not be bug-free, but the volume of player complaints suggests the issues ran deeper than anticipated. The action-adventure game currently sits at a 53 Metascore, and the Steam user sentiment mirrors that. For a studio making its first release, that is a tough opening week.
Here's the thing, though: the developer did not go quiet. Liquid Swords posted a detailed patch breakdown on Steam almost immediately, signaling that the team is paying attention.
What the April 10 patch actually fixes
The update is not a light touch. Performance improvements are front and center, with multiple fixes targeting PSO-related hitches, the kind that cause stuttering spikes even on capable hardware. Nanite and Lumen card misses are also addressed, which should help players running ray tracing configurations.
Crash fixes cover audio, animation, and GPU-related failures, including a specific fix for a crash that triggered when simply closing the game. There is also a race condition fix tied to ray tracing instance caching that was causing instability across different hardware setups.
Progression blockers get significant attention too:
- The "Thrill of the Fight" and "Running on Fumes" missions now function correctly after a save and continue
- The NPC "Suzy Red" no longer duplicates during the "Stitches for Snitches" mission
- Dave Shultz's tailing job no longer fails instantly because Dave spawned too far from the player
- The "No Whisper Dealers" chapter no longer incorrectly triggers a beatdown on enemy elimination
- Welcome Home 4's objective fail radius has been widened to something actually reasonable
General gameplay also sees fixes, including enemies that were not properly advancing in group encounters and AI that would wander into traffic to inspect dead bodies.
The patch also adds support for eight separate save file slots, a basic quality-of-life addition that was notably absent at launch.
The developer's commitment beyond this patch
"We are committed to the future of both Samson and Tyndalston, and this game will grow over time on all fronts; quality, gameplay and content," Liquid Swords stated in the patch announcement. The team confirmed that work beyond April 10 will continue targeting gameplay and animation issues, additional performance problems, and broader polish.
Console versions have not been officially announced, but Sundberg has said the studio will "get cracking" on them once the PC release is in a stable place. The implication is clear: console ports are not happening until the PC version earns them.
What this means for players sitting on the fence
If you held off on purchasing, April 10 is the earliest reasonable entry point. The patch addresses the most disruptive issues players have flagged, and Liquid Swords has been transparent about what is coming next. That transparency matters. A studio that communicates clearly in the first week of a troubled launch tends to follow through.
The core experience that reviewers found worth recommending is still there underneath the technical friction. For players who can tolerate some remaining rough edges while the team continues patching, the game appears to have genuine merit beneath the launch-week noise. Make sure to check out more:
