Developer Mintrocket, which rose to prominence with the mostly chill summer indie hit Dave the Diver earlier this year, is now working on something completely different in the form of Nakwon: Last Paradise, a PvPvE "extraction survival" game set in a zombie-plagued dystopian future.
Extraction games have become the big thing in the FPS space since the rise of Escape from Tarkov, with everything from the Warzone 2 DMZ to Bungie's upcoming Marathon providing their own spin on the format. The general idea is that you and a squad of co-op partners drop into an area filled with NPC enemies and look for loot while a bunch of other squads do the same.
Nakwon: Last Paradise turns that format into a survival horror experience, swapping most NPC combatants for unkillable zombies. You can attack the undead to temporarily disable them, but there's no way to bring them to a permanent end. Stealthy tactics will let you sneak by zombies as they sleep at night, but if you get into conflict with other player squads, you might just bring the horde a-running.
The devs have posted a pretty thorough breakdown of the main loop of the game over on Steam, but I think the highlight is this detail: "no one wins, no one loses." There's no victory condition for fighting with other players - your only real goal is to find enough food to stay alive between drops and enough weaponry to be effective in the next encounter. Deciding whether or not to fight other players is a constant balance of risk and reward.
There's no release date for Nakwon just yet, but the devs say a pre-alpha test is scheduled for 2023, so a selection of players will get to dive in soon enough. For now, you can check out the teaser trailer below.
Dave the Diver was the vibe of the summer and you might've expected Mintrocket to follow it up with a similarly low-key game with pixel art and casual elements, but nope, we're getting a completely different vibe here. At a minimum, I admire the dedication to trying new things.
Check out the best FPS games if your trigger finger is getting itchy.
