Checkpoint ’38
A historical roguelike narrative sim by indie studio Genesis Dawn (Romania). Full-campaign case study: Steam positioning, community build, and the launch to Steam Next Fest.
The client & the game
Checkpoint ’38 puts the player behind the desk of Franz Weber, a border guard at the Nazi-Swiss frontier in 1938. Inspired by Papers, Please and Beholder, every shift means inspecting forged papers, enforcing an ever-growing list of laws, and deciding how far to bend the rules to save a life — with a hidden system tracking the cost to Franz’s own family.
Genesis Dawn has been building the game solo; Game Marketing XP has run the marketing for close to a year, from first Steam page draft through the push to Steam Next Fest.
The challenge
Two problems stacked on top of each other. First, a sensitive subject: Nazi-symbol content triggered three rejections from Steam’s review before the page cleared Germany’s USK case-by-case process. Second, a genre-clarity problem: “roguelike document-inspection narrative sim” isn’t a shelf anyone browses — the positioning had to borrow instant recognition from Papers, Please while making the procedural-traveler system and family-welfare mechanic the actual differentiators.
The game itself
The loop the marketing keeps pointing back to: inspect a traveler’s documents, spot the discrepancy, decide.
The Instagram reveal
The reveal reel — “we’ve been working with the developers for almost a year” — passed 100K views, well above what a first announcement from a new account typically pulls.
Results so far
What we delivered
Full Steam store copy and positioning · grayscale document-themed social identity and templates · a 30+ post content calendar · Reddit community setup and moderation · Keymailer creator outreach campaign ahead of Next Fest · and the Instagram launch sequence above.
Game Marketing XP 