The New Wave of Retro Sci-Fi Horror FPS
The new wave of retro sci-fi horror FPS games is a trend where indie developers revive PS1 era shooter aesthetics and classic, System Shock inspired design to create story-driven, atmospheric experiences that blend nostalgic visuals with modern physics, narrative structure, and production values to stand apart from mainstream shooters focused on spectacle over tension. Retro FPS games are having a moment because players are tired of flat, interchangeable gun playgrounds and want shooters that feel dangerous, strange, and authored. Instead of chasing battle passes and live-service grinds, these projects bet on mood, pacing, and world-building. They are not comfort food; they are uncomfortable throwbacks sharpened by contemporary design ideas, and that contrast is exactly why they are starting to matter.
DERELIKT: PS1-Era Dread With System Shock Roots
DERELIKT is the clearest signal that the PS1 era shooter style is back with teeth. Billed as a story-driven retro FPS inspired by PS1-era sci-fi horror, it wears its influences openly: System Shock 2, Alien Resurrection, and Doom 3 all feed into its vision of being stranded in hostile sci-fi architecture with limited tools and information. You wake up in orbit around Saturn, inside Von Neumann Outpost, a research station carved into a drifting asteroid that has fallen into darkness and chaos. Like its inspirations, it places you in a dangerous place with few supplies and little hope of rescue—a deliberate rejection of power fantasy. DERELIKT fully embraces the look and feel of early 3D horror games, faithfully recreating the PS1 visual style with warped geometry, affine texture warping, hand-painted vertex colors, and full-motion CGI cutscenes to summon that chunky, unsettling aesthetic.
What makes DERELIKT more than nostalgic cosplay is its focus on systemic storytelling. You explore dark hallways, laboratories, and living quarters, collecting supplies, solving simple puzzles, and unlocking new paths through the station as the danger ramps up. More than a dozen NPCs still occupy the outpost, each with different goals and conflicting versions of the truth. Some may help, some may sabotage, and some blur the line between the two. That willingness to let characters disagree on reality feels closer to immersive sim sensibilities than to corridor shooters, and it turns the sci-fi horror FPS structure into a narrative maze rather than a series of arenas. According to the game’s publisher, DERELIKT is planned for release late this year. That timeline matters: it means the retro FPS games conversation is not hypothetical anymore; players who grew up on polygonal nightmares can soon test whether this indie FPS revival lives up to its influences.
Ill: Half-Life 2 Philosophy in a Grotesque Sandbox
If DERELIKT resurrects PS1-era dread, Ill takes the opposite route: it looks almost like a blockbuster while behaving like a System Shock inspired experiment in physics-driven horror. Ill has been described as possibly the grossest game in development, a "bloody shooting horror" built around gore, dismemberment, and a weighty feel to combat. Its creator, Maxim Verehin, and his friends began development around 2020–2021 without knowing how to make a big game or start a project of this scale, admitting they couldn’t understand how hard it is. That inexperience hasn’t stopped the team from chasing Half-Life 2-level ambition. Verehin repeatedly cites Valve’s seminal story shooter as inspiration, and that choice says a lot: Ill wants to guide players through a full journey where familiar locations slowly give way to stranger spaces and more complex, secretive characters, echoing Half-Life 2’s escalation from mundane oppression to surreal resistance.
Ill’s most interesting bet is on interactivity. There is a link to Half-Life 2 in its physics-based combat, where enemies can behave in different ways depending on what’s around them, including picking up objects to throw at the player. You can blow off limbs and then watch how monsters react to that change, turning dismemberment into a gameplay system rather than pure shock. Verehin says the team wants to see physics, to see how bodies dismember and how impacts affect monsters, making fights feel alive and encouraging players to experiment. On top of that, there is a workbench mechanic where you can craft healing items and upgrade weapons using resources found in the world, with visible upgrades on the gear. For a project that started as a dream among friends and grew into a team of around 70 people making one of today’s most anticipated horror games, Ill proves that the indie FPS revival is not limited to lo-fi visuals; it also means small-origin studios can aim for complex systems and disrupt established norms even if they began in a relative nowhere of the traditional games industry.
Beyond Nostalgia: Why These Shooters Matter Now
It would be easy to frame DERELIKT and Ill as nostalgia bait, but that misses the point. The retro FPS games movement is less about pixel worship and more about a backlash against sanded-down, low-stakes mainstream shooters. DERELIKT puts players in a place of scarcity and confusion with few supplies and little hope of rescue, while Ill turns horror into a physics-driven playground of dismemberment and reactive enemies. Both refuse the comfort of perfect information and predictable encounters. They embrace tension, uncertainty, and the idea that every room should feel like a problem rather than a shooting gallery. These games also bet on narrative depth: DERELIKT’s dozen NPCs with conflicting truths and Ill’s coma framing and escalating journey through increasingly strange locations push the sci-fi horror FPS toward character and context, not just monsters.
This indie FPS revival is relevant to players who grew up on System Shock inspired experiments and to younger audiences bored with safe formulas. If you are a fan of those earlier games, you are directly invited to pay attention to DERELIKT, and Ill is designed as the kind of "bloody shooting horror" its own creators would buy instantly on Steam. Ill may be the grossest game in development, but through it, Verehin and Team Clout are showing it is possible to break into the games industry and disrupt established norms with an ambitious shooter built from a relative nowhere. That matters: when horror FPS games stop chasing mass-market comfort and start chasing specific, even unpleasant visions, they reclaim their edge. The future of retro sci-fi horror FPS is not a museum of old tricks; it is a laboratory where discomfort, scarcity, and physics collide.
What Comes Next for Retro FPS Games
The most exciting thing about this moment is that it feels unfinished. Hyperstrange plans to release DERELIKT late this year, and Ill is still described as "super complicated" to make, a project in motion rather than a finalized product. That incompleteness is a strength: it suggests a space where more sci-fi horror FPS experiments can emerge, where PS1-era aesthetics coexist with near-blockbuster fidelity, and where narrative-driven shooters slip between indie and mainstream expectations. The line between "retro" and "modern" is blurring; what counts is whether a game has a point of view. DERELIKT’s warped geometry and CGI cutscenes are as deliberate as Ill’s hyper-detailed gore and physics.
What should players and creators expect next? More risk. If small teams can grow from concept-art roots to 70-person operations making anticipated horror games, more artists will see the sci-fi horror FPS as a viable canvas. We will likely see other PS1 era shooter tributes that go beyond visuals into systemic storytelling, and more System Shock inspired hybrids that treat guns as tools in simulations rather than simple damage dealers. The important thing is that these projects refuse neutrality. They are opinionated about fear, pace, and texture. That is the lesson to carry forward: the most memorable shooters are not the ones with the widest audiences, but the ones with the sharpest intent. If this indie FPS revival keeps that edge, retro sci-fi horror will not be a fad—it will be the genre’s conscience.
