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

Editor's note, July 29, 2026: an earlier version attributed extensive gameplay details to a RachtaZ video that Nerdrassil could not locate or verify. Those claims have been removed. This is an editorial preview based on public developer material, not a hands-on account.

HUNGER is a first-person PvPvE extraction RPG with horror elements, set in the early 1800s after war and plague destroyed Europe. The official Steam page calls the setting the World After the End. Players enter alone or in duos and trios, run quests, loot ruins, and fight monsters and rival survivors from a hub called the Chateau. The current testing page offers public access requests rather than the private NDA-only state described in the original article.

The public pitch immediately separates HUNGER from short-session extraction shooters. Progression is designed to run from level 1 to 100 without forced wipes, with professions, crafting, a player market, dungeons, bosses, talents, and proximity voice chat listed as major systems. That is an ambitious stack. It also means HUNGER will be judged less by one clever firefight than by whether all those systems continue giving a survivor reasons to return.

One musket ball solves most disagreements

Everything in the official material points toward the kind of period combat this premise needs: firearms with visible downtime, melee weapons that matter when a shot is spent, and fights in which positioning matters more than spraying ammunition. In an Epic Games Store interview, developer Max Rea identifies Hunt: Showdown and Bloodborne among the inspirations. That lineage explains the deliberate pace without proving that HUNGER has already matched either game.

Melee is therefore more than a backup animation. Axes, maces, blades, and period firearms need to create different commitments, especially when a slow reload exposes the person who fired. The attractive possibility is a duel that cannot collapse into a simple damage race. The risk is that deliberate movement becomes clumsy without clear hit reactions, reliable spacing, and enough defensive control. Public footage can show the animation; only wider testing can establish how fair the timing feels.

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 volume of progression it publicly promises. Survivors, talents, professions, crafting, a market, dungeons, and a long level path can make an expedition feel connected to a larger role-playing game. They can also turn every loss into administrative work. Persistent progression needs to create new choices without making a veteran's statistics so dominant that a new player becomes target practice.

The Chateau is a useful part of that ambition because it turns preparation into a place rather than a stack of menus. Traders, professions, and other survivors can make the time between raids feel connected to the world. The design still has to respect speed. Walking to a vendor is atmospheric once; repeating the route after every failed run can become friction. A social hub works when it creates encounters and identity, not when it hides ordinary inventory work behind distance.

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 dungeons interest me more than any promise of endless levels. The Steam description presents them as dangerous group content inside the same persistent world. That could give high-level characters an objective beyond hunting less-equipped players, provided the rewards do not make the power gap worse. Dungeons also give the horror art direction somewhere to concentrate rather than spreading every threat across a sunlit outdoor map.

So HUNGER waits on the wishlist while public testing continues and the Early Access date remains unannounced. The premise has a strong identity, and the official feature list is unusually ambitious. That is reason to watch, not evidence that the systems already work. If the combat feels as deliberate as it looks, the persistent progression respects new players, and somebody eventually turns off the sun, the Chateau could become difficult to leave.