Big updates are arriving soon to Aether & Iron, and it seems like there could be even more in the future. As you can see in the new trailer above, a new roadside garage, new missions, and a new dice mini game are coming soon to the 1930s-set Decopunk narrative RPG.
Ahead of the reveal, which debuted exclusively at IGN Live 2026, I sat down with the team at Seismic Squirrel to chat about why these new updates might not be the last new material we see from the game and what players might expect in terms of future lore.
“Our game is built off the graveyard of darlings,” says Aether & Iron’s Narrative Tyler Whitney. “When we were building this, narratively, it was a lot more ambitious [with regard to] the scope of how big things would be. And the more that we built out the game, the more we realized that we had to trim narratively things down in order to fit what the team was capable of. And what was left on the cutting room floor is a lot more of New York history that I wanted to put forward.”
“At one point our Production Supervisor, Josh [Enz], came in and killed two-thirds of the game,” says Creative Director Duane Stinnett. “So what we released is about 33% of what we originally scoped. But you get a better experience than if we had tried to stretch it across so much more. So it ends up working out for the best.”
When I asked Whitney if leaving two thirds of the game on the cutting room floor meant that potential sequels to Aether & Iron were a possibility, he said he’s open to it.
“Look, you can’t confirm anything,” Whitney says. “We would love the opportunity. We have a massive backlog of material. I wrote a big wiki for everything. The amount of world building that was written internally compared to what made the game is a depressingly small percentage. So if people love the game, if people want to see more, we have so much more to share.”
Key to the unique appeal of Aether & Iron are the retro floating cars (powered by the titular Aether) which are used in combat, racing, and act as a central pillar of the game. I asked Whitney and Stinnett how they balanced the chaotic fantasy of 1930s flying cars with the rigid demands of a turn-based tactical strategy game.
“It was a very painful process,” Stinnett says. “The game was initially prototyped as a fully free-roaming 3D game. We went through so many iterations looking at how other titles handled turn-based three-dimensional flight with depth, and honestly nothing was clicking. It just didn’t feel right.”
“With turn-based tactical combat, one problem that we kept running into was like, ‘Okay, how do we make them feel like flying cars?’” Whitney says. “What difference does it make? And so we really tried to figure out ways to [to make] the combat feel unique. And I think that’s what goes a long way in making the story feel interesting and compelling.”
“We finally landed on an isometric view where the vehicles are bound to these glowing blue ‘Aether roads,’” Stinnett says. “In earlier builds, they hovered over normal cobblestones, but it just looked like they were driving normally; there was no sense of vertigo or depth. Now, the roads are made of a gaseous, translucent blue mist. You can see right through them into the empty air below. It allowed us to keep the combat grounded enough to make tactical sense, but players can still jump in, split lanes, and utilize car momentum to slam wreckage into enemy lines.”
And while the cars in Aether & Iron might at first glance appear to be based on real ones from the 1930s, the team confirms that the vehicles in the game were actually built from the ground up by the team at Seismic Squirrel.
“It’s really an amalgamation of existing vehicles that were heightened and adapted to fit the narrative in whatever context they lived in the world and in the narrative,” Stinnett says. “We would’ve had to get clearances to use real cars because [some of those] car companies still exist to this day. So [the vehicles in Aether & Iron] are sort of amalgamations of existing cars.
“So for the Lowers, which is the lowest segment of society, the working class industrial section, a lot of the cars are retrofitted to fly, but they were ground cars originally. So you take a crappy Model T or something, it’s all rusted out and you retrofit it with lifters and that’s how people get around. And then by the time you get to the top of the city, everything’s sort of like 1930s built from the ground up to fly.”
Although the vehicles were designed from scratch, there was still plenty of inspiration behind Aether & Iron that the creators leaned into when building the game.
“One of the games that I first fell in love with was BioShock on my Xbox 360,” Whitney says. “I fell in love with the world so much that I bought the books and made up stories in my head for what happened. And then Gangs New York and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, two movies that were instrumental in my upbringing, definitely find home in [our game] because of [their] romanticism. I think that’s something that followed us through into Aether & Iron.”
Aether & Iron is available now on Steam.
Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Events & Entertainment at IGN, leading entertainment content and coverage of tentpole events including IGN Live, San Diego Comic Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He’s spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton
