Hunger is an extraction RPG inspired by Hunt: Showdown, Bloodborne, and more
6.30.2025
By Toussaint Egan, Contributor
Set in Napoleonic Europe, Hunger centers on a group of survivors holding out against an apocalyptic rabies-like virus—the titular Hunger—that’s swept across the whole of the continent. Players assume the role of one of six survivors, known as the Living, who must fight to defend the denizens of the Chateau from the Hunger-afflicted hordes outside its walls. The Chateau, inspired by the real-life Mont-Saint-Michel, is one of the last remaining strongholds of humanity.
The Living embark on expeditions on behalf of the Chateau’s various factions, collecting resources, forging new weapons, and unearthing the plague's origins in hopes of ridding humanity of this otherworldly blight. Whether playing alone or in a group of three, players venture into the ruins of the world in search of glory and survival.
“I've long held a fascination with the Victorian era, or the Renaissance era, and a kind of Gothic sensibility—and that’s been floating around my head for a very long time,” says Maximilian Rea, CEO of Good Fun Corporation and Lead Developer on Hunger. “I've always been fascinated by that idea of both the eccentricity of the period and how well it kind of blends with folklore and mythology.”
Rea elaborated on how Good Fun Corporation’s previous experience with Hell Let Loose inspired them to create an original universe all their own. “When myself and the rest of the team were working on Hell Let Loose, we were obviously trying to create a fun game, but wrapped in this extremely authentic historical package in which a lot of the fans of the game were very, very particular about the level of historical authenticity and realism,” Rea says.
“The setting of Hunger—which is in the Napoleonic era—came out of a general interest in history amongst myself and the rest of the team," Rea continues. "But then the sort of alternate reality idea was born out of, ‘What if we could actually affect history as developers, as creatives, rather than be so buttoned down by the historical reality.'”
When asked about the initial inspirations behind Hunger’s universe and tone, Rea cites an eclectic range of influences including Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“There's so many works of fiction set in and adjacent to the Napoleonic era that I just thought were super eccentric in their own right, even if you took out any kind of fantastical element,” Rea says. “I think we're all aware that the best fantasy and sci-fi is, ironically, the stuff closest to historical and political parallels, because we can therefore understand how the pieces are arranged on the chessboard, and then we can watch them interact with each other. Game of Thrones was a good example of that, using so many situations that actually occurred in medieval history, and then bringing them in and giving this real sense of authenticity to all the events that unfolded onscreen.”
The historical influence doesn’t just stop there, however. Rea describes Hunger’s art style as "Renaissance Gothic,” drawing a wellspring of inspiration from the artists of both that period and their aesthetic successors to create a look that is at once evocative of the era while creatively liberating to the development team.
“Caravaggio has always been one of my favorite artists,” Rea says. “He’s a Renaissance painter who really popularized chiaroscuro—the use of deep blacks to conceal everything that isn’t the action of the scene—and extreme violence. There’s a very famous painting by him of Judith beheading Holofernes.” Rea also cites English Victorian era painters such as John Everett Millais as well as Dutch masters of landscape painting as influences behind Hunger’s characters and environmental design.
After stepping away from Hell Let Loose, Rea and his team began to think about what they wanted to pursue next. Naturally, their attention was drawn towards extraction shooters, a genre which they were well-acquainted with.
“We’ve played every extraction shooter, from big to small,” Rea says. “A lot of the inspiration we found was less in the Delta Forces and DMZs of the world, and much more in The Cycle: Frontier, Marauders, Hunt: Showdown, and obviously Escape from Tarkov, just being the grandfather of these games. We were thinking a lot about how we could marry this love of the historical and fantastical with the gratifications of an extraction shooter.”
In spite of these touchpoints, Rea and team don't categorize Hunger as strictly an extraction shooter. “The elevator pitch for Hunger is to not create a Capital-E, Capital-S, Extraction Shooter, but actually to use the extraction gameplay loop in the same way that Diablo uses the extraction gameplay loop without calling itself an extraction game,” Rea says. “Hunger is effectively a multiplayer, first-person RPG with skill trees, with tons of different weapons, with lots of looting and all manner of loot—gear, gadgets, healing items, crafting, and cosmetics—that uses an extraction format, instead of a linear format or an open world format.”
To put it another way, Hunger is what happens when you combine Hunt: Showdown, Bloodborne, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance into an ambitious horror RPG.
For Rea, this distinction is important not only in understanding what Hunger is and what it has to offer to players, but also vital in tapping into the extraction subgenre as a whole. “Extraction shooters, I feel, are a kind-of multiplayer roguelike, in that you're trying to find vertical depth in something that is the same experience, ostensibly, over and over and over again,” Rea says.
He cites examples such as Hades, Risk of Rain 2, and Slay the Spire, games that may not fit the granular definition of “extraction” games, but nonetheless offer the same level of variability and freedom of expression afforded by an extraction shooter.
“And so I think it was this idea that, wait a second, you can present the same environment to people and show them ways to discover and interact with it over and over and over again, rather than have a team of 700 people make an unbelievably huge, giant open-world game,” Rea continues.
Good Fun Corporation aims to launch Hunger into Early Access on Epic Games Store in the latter half of 2025, and the team has big plans for the game’s opening salvo of playable content. This includes six playable characters, each with their own unique passive, tactical, and ultimate abilities designed to ease players in before encouraging them to venture off the beaten path to build out their own bespoke playstyle.
“What we're doing with each of them is trying to aim for an unusual cast of archetypal characters of the era, who will each loosely fill a role without being too binding,” Rea says. “A lot of the time, what the passive, the tactical, and ultimate abilities allow you to do is something that you can do in the mastery tree as well, or it's something that a piece of food or drink (which are items in the game) can do as well.”
Hunger’s Early Access launch will introduce Hugo, the ex-French nobleman and nihilistic aristocrat; Eva, an assassin and thief who grew up in Paris's slum districts; Serene, a survivor of a slave revolt who hails from the Isle of Santa Dominga; Marie, a “battle nun” who descends from a Cistercian sect nestled high in the mountains; Gabriel, a special forces cavalryman of Napoleon’s Grande Armée bound by the code of the noblesse oblige; and a name-in-flux Prussian mercenary who sustains other players with their access to armor crafting and repairs.
“The big thing for us is, none of our characters are wholly sympathetic,” Rea says. “To survive in this place requires incredible fortitude, a level of brutality, and frankly, a level of sociopathy. The ability to cut your losses and run. You have this really unlikely group of people, and we've worked very hard to try and make each one of them feel logical in that they would have survived this terrifying ordeal. Like all of us, they're painted in shades of gray, and we wanted to touch on a lot of different cultural backgrounds.”
The same level of thought and intention directed towards the design and respective backgrounds of Hunger’s player characters is also brought to bear on the enemies, each of which are designed to exemplify a different type of danger. The hierarchy of enemies you’ll encounter in the game includes the Dregs (prototypical zombie-like adversaries), the Shambler (equivalent in threat to a fully-armored player with a massive, crushed hand spiked with nails), the Waif (who scuttles around the floor and swipes at the player’s legs to inflict damage), the Bloat (explodes to spread poison gas), the Drooler (lobs projectiles with its tongue), and the Brute, a massive enemy that deals heavy damage.
These six enemy archetypes will appear during Hunger’s Early Access launch, with the plan being to rapidly introduce new types of Hunger shortly thereafter, as well as additional in-game factions.
“The idea is just to hopefully keep surprising, potentially scaring, and challenging the player,” says Rea. Much like the six initial player characters, each of the six different types of Hunger will feature their own unique backstory exploring the nature of the disease and the toll that it has taken on those afflicted by it. “The worst horror is when you understand the person before. It’s harder to mow down millions of zombies if you have a name and an age and the hopes and dreams of every zombie. That changes the equation in a really awful way which, we think, is important to kind of fully steep you in the grimness of this reality.”
With an arsenal of over 30 weapons, a vibrant and evolving social hub, and three maps (1x1 kilometers in scope) available at launch, Hunger feels all but certain to be a hit among RPG and extraction shooter fans once it’s released into Early Access later this year. In terms of how long that Early Access period will last, Rea estimates that Hunger will take approximately two years after initial release to reach 1.0.
“What finishing Early Access would look like to us is making sure that there is an extremely deep and rich and compelling end game there for players,” Rea says. “We will be launching a really large experience anyway, but we want to have some specific PvP experiences and a larger breadth of PvE experiences for your end game. We want to have a large cast of characters to choose from and a greater fullness of tools, weapons, and maps as well in the game.”
Hunger will launch in Early Access on the Epic Games Store later this year.