HUNGER: The Napoleonic Extraction Shooter I Can't Wait For

I quit modern military shooters years ago. It was easy. Everyone spawns with the most advanced rifle available and more ammo than a supply depot, and every kill still takes half a magazine, because those tactical outfits perform almost like plate armor. I detest that math. So when a plague-ridden Napoleonic extraction shooter called HUNGER surfaced, promising muskets, long reloads, and heavy melee, it went on my wishlist the same day.

HUNGER is a first-person PvPvE extraction shooter with horror and RPG elements, set in the early 1800s in a Europe wrecked by war and then finished off by a plague the game calls the Hunger. The Steam page names this setting the World After the End, a title that fully commits to the bit. You pick a survivor from a roster known as the Living, then head out solo or in duos and trios to run quests, loot ruins, and fight monsters and players alike, all staged from the Chateau, a hub stuffed with shopkeepers, bounty hunters, and quest givers. Right now the game sits in an NDA playtest. Early access is coming, but nobody has a date.

My way in was RachtaZ. I follow his channel for Hunt: Showdown videos, the same game whose Cargo Balloon update I wrote about last week, so when he published his first HUNGER video, a full new-player walkthrough running from the tutorial to level 11, clicking it was pure reflex. He says he'll pin the early access date in his comments once it exists. I have rarely awaited a pinned comment with this much interest.

One musket ball solves most disagreements

Everything in that video lines up with what I want from period combat. The arsenal is muskets, flintlock pistols, and an experimental hand mortar that lobs explosive glass grenades. Reloads take ages. Most early weapons kill in one shot, and the game openly designs around that fact: Hugo, the character RachtaZ recommends to beginners, has a tactical ability whose entire job is absorbing one incoming hit, a perk he rates highly because early weapons tend to pair that single shot with a very long reload.

When the powder runs dry, HUNGER leans into melee harder than Hunt ever has. You cannot fight with bare fists, so a trader named Louis hands newcomers a free wooden knife, and from there it is axes, maces, and long swords. A stamina bar rules your sprinting and dodging while a separate energy bar rules swings and blocks, and you choose your attack angle by scrolling, up for a stab, down for an overhead chop. That deliberate clunk is the point; it keeps a duel from collapsing into a DPS race. There is even a mastery trait you must unlock just to sprint while holding a charged swing. RachtaZ got caught without it mid-duel and described the resulting fight as a bit goofy.

Hunt: Showdown owns an embarrassing share of my playtime for one simple reason: nobody in that bayou has ever heard of body armor. One clean shot settles the argument, ammo is scarce enough that every trigger pull is a small financial decision, and the pace slows into something closer to chess with black powder. From everything shown so far, HUNGER runs on the same philosophy, then doubles down with the melee layer. Hunt players will recognize some of the furniture as well: sound traps, roaming bosses, dungeons, and an audio game that gives away sloppy movement.

The RPG layer goes far past Hunt

What separates HUNGER from its obvious inspirations is the sheer volume of progression. RachtaZ calls it the most progression he has ever seen in an online PvP game, and the receipts pile up fast. Every one of the Living carries a backstory plus passive, tactical, and ultimate abilities that unlock by level. Hugo again: a passive granting 15% to all movement speeds, that one-shot absorb as his tactical, and an ultimate named Maniac that cuts all incoming damage by 25%. Above that sit mastery trees holding more than 100 talents, covering silent movement, lockpicking, reload speed, weapon control, and even repairing your teammates' armor mid-raid.

It keeps going. Extractions open on a timer, appear on your compass, and demand a 30 second wait that is practically begging to be third-partied. Post-raid you unlock professions, so a gunsmith crafts weapons from found blueprints while a cook turns scavenged food into buffs. Level 10 opens a second character seat with its own inventory. Solo players collect triple XP as compensation for sharing lobbies with duos and trios. You can reload, heal, and patch your armor while rummaging through a corpse's pockets, which is grim multitasking I respect. And the lobby itself is playable: instead of clicking through a menu, you walk the Chateau among the traders and other survivors.

My one complaint: it is always noon

Every outdoor map shown so far seems to run in broad daylight. Interiors do their part, the chapel above is one snuffed candle away from pitch black, but outside it is permanently a hazy afternoon at the end of the world. The monsters crawled out of a plague, the fiction is pure gothic dread, and the sun is out. That reads like a card left on the table. Give me a night map. Give me rain drumming on a ruined monastery roof while something shrieks two hedgerows over. Hunt proved years ago how much a dark map multiplies tension, and this setting begs for it even louder. If anyone from the studio is reading: one thunderstorm, please.

Wishlisted, aggressively

The endgame apparently shifts gears. Deep progression unlocks semi-automatic and even automatic weapons, plus perk builds tuned for speed, which I have decided not to think about until it becomes my problem. The dungeons interest me far more. RachtaZ describes them as the Dark Souls of the game: hardcore endgame runs that demand legendary gear and a coordinated team, tough enough that he admits he never got close to one during the playtest.

So HUNGER waits on my wishlist while the NDA playtest grinds on and the early access date stays a mystery. If the shooting feels half as deliberate as it looks, and if somebody at that studio eventually turns off the sun, the Chateau is going to see far too much of me.