Mistfall Hunter is a cursed genre combo that somehow turned out great

Mistfall Hunter is a third-person, fantasy extraction shooter with Souls-like combat. 

Even if you’re a major Souls fan or the biggest extraction nut out there, that combo of words is likely enough to induce vomiting or, at least, cause you to exit out of this article in disgust.

But wait, dear reader, as Mistfall Hunter is far better than it has any right to be.

At the start of your journey, you’ll pick between a handful of classic fantasy classes, like rogue, magic user, knight, bow guy, healer, and barbarian. You’ll then get dropped into one of the game’s maps to learn the ropes.

The idea, like all extraction shooters, is pretty simple. You’ll start by grabbing some gear from your warehouse chest at your home base — shitty, grey gear is easy to come by, while higher rarities come with better stats, but are difficult to find. You'll then take that gear and adventure into a landscape filled with PvE foes for you to fight and quests to complete.

Unlike it's sci-fi contemporaries, which have you looting old military bases, science stations, or mowing down hoards of UESC robots, Mistfall has you and your squad roll up on zombies, fish people, harpies, and wickermen in a surprisingly fleshed out fantasy world. Killing these creatures will give you access to their loot, as will completing some additional in-match quests.

The best way to get loot, however, is to fight other players, who are also roaming the map, doing their own sets of objectives, and looking for loot. 

The combat style is the thing that immediately sets Mistfall apart from other extraction games, which focus on pristine gunplay and clicking heads. You have a medieval armory, with the speed to match. The whole thing feels like a FromSoftware game, complete with an orchestral arrangement behind the game's boss fights ... if, perhaps, a bit clunkier. While the combat feels visceral in PvE, it really shines once you're engaged with other players in PVP.

As the Barbarian character, I’m running around, trying to make up ground between myself and the squishy members of the enemy team, like their magic Seer. I have to balance that with protecting my own teammates, who can easily get singled out and destroyed by a stealthy Rogue. The pace creates these deeply memorable PvP engagements, where you're trying to bait out a PvE boss to do your work for you, or hiding behind a door to single out and ambush one of their foes.

When it’s time to leave the match, the weirdness of Mistfall Hunter really shines through, as the traditional Exfil beacon is replace by a little bell demon that you and your friends have to beat the Christ out of. When you’re finished, the bell demon will sprout a tree with a figurative dinner bell to ring as you attempt to escape the area and return to the safety of your home base.

Describing almost all Next Fest demos these days feel a bit like “it’s like if X was in Y.” And hey, that’s ok, we’ve gotten some truly awesome games like that. But Mistfall Hunter is one of the few demos I’ve played that’s really shocked me ... even if it is just "it's like if Dark Souls was an extraction shooter."

I’ve spent a lot of time playing Marathon over the last three months — about 400 hours, if my Steam count is accurate — and I spend most days that I’m not playing it thinking about it. And since I played Mistfall, I’ve been getting a similar feeling. Whenever I log off, I’m desperate to make more plans for the next day, and that’s a pretty encouraging sign. 

The beta for Mistfall Hunter runs until June 22, and the game comes out in on July 30.

Some friendly warnings before you go, one of which is cool, and the other ... isn't:

• While it’s going, and free, you can win a Steam code for the game by extracting and deciphering special ciphers in the beta. These normally just include the game's equivalent of gold, but there are also cosmetics that can be won in addition to the aforementioned game code.
• The game's character and enemy design relies really heavily on the male gaze, and has some pretty gnarly jiggle physics. This is pretty obvious if you're playing as a female character – like I do in most MMOs – and is especially egregious with the cosmetic outfits. The game is just pretty icky when it comes to its depiction of all female characters (think Quiet in MGSV). If you're sensitive to that ... you might want to peek the box art and see how much it skeeves you out before diving in.