Funded on Kickstarter in 2019 and digitally released in 2022, retro RPG Chained Echoes garnered praise from fans who found it a stirring throwback to the likes of Chrono Trigger while sporting its own distinct story and identity. Now Matthias Linda, the solo dev behind Chained Echoes developer Umami Tiger, has announced that he’s terminating his business relationship with First Press Games and “preparing a lawsuit” against the company for its failure to produce the physical copies owed to the Kickstarter backers of the 16-bit-style RPG.
The Kickstarter page for Chained Echoes launched on February 5, 2019, with the project being fully funded on Kickstarter by March 2, 2019 and the game itself officially released on December 8, 2022. However, in between all of this, stretch goals for physical editions of Chained Echoes for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC were met.
As Linda explained in the latest Kickstarter update earlier today, only the PlayStation 4 copies of the game ever made it into backers’ hands, even though the approval process “finished in Q4 of 2023.”
“It’s been a bit over 2 years since the physical copies were supposed to be released by First Press Games and so far in 2026 nothing has arrived except the regular Playstation 4 edition. Because of that I had to make a decision: I am terminating my business relationship with FPG and I am preparing a lawsuit,” Linda revealed. “Please understand that for legal reasons I can not go into further details.”
This isn’t the first time First Press Games has been accused of failing to fulfill its orders. In fact, close to a dozen indie devs have reported running into similar problems with the company over the past four years. Worse still, even though Linda states that it’s been over two years since the physical editions of Chained Echoes were supposed to be released, you can still place an order for physical editions of the game through First Press Games’ website.
Unfortunately, if you did order the game through First Press Games and not through Chained Echoes’ Kickstarter page, it sounds like Linda won’t be able to refund your order, either. “In case someone upgraded their Kickstarter order to a better or different version with the vouchers through FPG’s store I decided to compensate for that as well. This applies only to orders that were done with the Kickstarter voucher, not orders that were done independently.”
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