The Citadel Project hits Steam Early Access on 11 November - will your PC run it?

GTX 980 minimum. I had to read that twice. In a year where every second spec sheet wants an RTX 3060 just to open the menu, The Citadel Project lists a 2014 graphics card as its floor, and that alone makes it worth a look for anyone sitting on an older rig.

Quick orientation if the name means nothing to you: The Citadel Project is a first-person stealth game from Reliquary Software, which as far as I can tell is one person, self-publishing. The pitch is Thief with a dose of Dark Messiah: a medieval megastructure that's being eaten from the inside by some kind of infection, undead guards doing the patrol routes, and you creeping through the dark with light RPG systems layered on top. Strong horror elements, per the Steam page. The store listing has it arriving on 11 November 2026 - that's Wednesday - and the important word next to the date is Early Access.

Here's what the Steam page asks of your machine:

Minimum: Windows 10, Intel Core i5-10400 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 980 or AMD RX 580, 10 GB of storage.

Recommended: Windows 11, Core i5-12600K or Ryzen 5 7600X, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3060 or RX 9060 XT, same 10 GB.

The GPU side is genuinely generous. A GTX 980 or RX 580 as the entry point means the hand-me-down PC we keep talking about in the forum qualifies, and the RTX 3060 recommendation is a card you can find used for very little now. 10 GB of storage is tiny by 2026 standards; this isn't a game that'll eat your SSD.

The line that bugs me is memory. 16 GB minimum and 32 GB recommended for a solo-dev stealth game is a lot, and in the middle of a DRAM crunch where a 2x16 kit costs more than it did in summer, it's the one requirement that actually costs money to fix. My guess - and it's a guess, the developer hasn't said - is that this is a conservative Early Access number from someone who'd rather overstate than get refund requests. If you're on 16 GB, I wouldn't upgrade for this. Close your browser tabs and try it.

The other asterisk is the Early Access label itself. A one-person project in EA means you're buying a slice of a game and a promise, and stealth is a genre that lives on AI consistency: if a guard's hearing or vision cone behaves differently from one patch to the next, your whole mental model resets. That's not a reason to skip it, but it's a reason to read the EA description on the store page before you click buy, and to treat week-one impressions as impressions of a build, not of a game. There's no price on the listing yet, so I can't tell you whether it's an impulse purchase or a considered one.

What I'd do on Wednesday: if the price is reasonable, grab it, run the first area, and watch your frametimes rather than your average fps. Stealth games are unusually sensitive to hitching because you're reading tiny movements in the dark, and a shader stutter at the exact moment a guard turns is the kind of thing that gets a game uninstalled unfairly. Steam's two-hour refund window is your benchmark run. Use it.

Image: Dennis G. Jarvis / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Romania-1810_-_Citadel_(7664198014).jpg