Mistfall Hunter is a promising, if curious little creature of a game—with a playable demo for Steam's Next Fest available now, it seems to market itself as an extraction soulslike. Well, the Steam page says it's a "dark fantasy extraction ARPG," but it's clearly trying to capture soulslike vibes. There's a shrine maiden equivalent, combat is deliberate and positioning-based, its inspirations are on the sleeve, the forearm, and right up to the elbow.

So colour me surprised when I get stuck into a match and I'm having flashbacks to 2018—in practice, Mistfall Hunter plays a lot more like a slower-paced version of the God of War (the 2018 reboot) than something like Elden Ring Nightreign. Movement is slow and methodical, your camera's over-the-shoulder, and environments are a claustrophobic series of rooms and corridors.

I don't hate it, though! I especially don't hate the fact there's no lock-on system, because the intent of developer Bellring Games becomes pretty clear: Mistfall Hunter is a game about positioning. Most of my attacks lunge me forward in some way, tasking me with playing footsies and stringing my abilities together.

Which means that PvP is a heck of a lot more interesting than their soulslike equivalents, which I've never enjoyed—I know some people love it, but the lag-laden backstab roulette of games like Elden Ring has always felt so irritating that I've never been able to get into it. Not so here.

It helps that all the fighting feels very competently designed, if a little slow-paced. Everything has a sense of weight and impact as I shield-slam and carve up the NPC zombies that litter the map. And while the baseline's simplistic and relatively non-punishing, I get the sense I'm far too early-days to actually pass judgement on the game's complexity.

Mistfall Hunter, otherwise, is 100% an extraction game—and I feel almost targeted by exactly how up my alley it is, as though somebody knew I'd had trouble getting into the genre before and went "right, we're gonna get Harvey with this one".

All the hallmarks of the genre are there—you drop into an exploration zone, you knock over monsters and grab loot, and you potentially run into other players. Your objective's to get out with your spoils (weapons, armor, consumables, and a ton of very specific crafting gubbins) without dying, which'll rob you of all of 'em. To make said getaway, you activate a shrine, track down a little bell goblin, and merk it, ascending through a portal.

But what really has me hooked are the secondary systems. Mistfall Hunter's meta-progression doesn't just involve gear, it also has skill trees and unlockable, class-based abilities. And I'm weak for that kind of thing. There's even a perfect block, and we all know how I feel about parrying.

In other words, it all looks very promising, and it seems like I'm not necessarily alone in that. Mistfall Hunter's already gathered a promising 16,000 players and rising per SteamDB, and I'll be curious to see if it'll carve out a niche in the genre; among soulslike action game freaks like me, Nightreign enthusiasts who wished FromSoftware had added PvP, extraction shooter hobbyists who are tired of all the guns, or all of the above.