Retro Fear, Modern Loops: What This Indie FPS Wave Is
The emerging wave of retro FPS games is a cluster of small-scale shooters that use PS1-era horror visuals, story-driven FPS design, and experimental systems like extraction shooter mechanics to push beyond nostalgic fan service and build new, tightly focused experiences for players tired of big-budget homogeneity. This latest round of indie shooter trailers signals that developers see opportunity where major publishers often do not: in single-player dread, dungeon loops, and high-risk action that refuses to smooth off its edges. DERELIKT, Expedition: Into Darkness, and Kusan: City of Wolves do not chase battle passes or massive lobbies; they chase mood, mechanical tension, and the thrill of learning a dangerous space by dying in it. That is the real renaissance—less about pixels, more about priorities.
DERELIKT: PS1-Era Horror as a Design Statement
DERELIKT is the clearest sign that PS1-era horror aesthetics are no longer a gimmick but a deliberate design stance. Visuwyg and Hyperstrange have released a new gameplay trailer for DERELIKT, a story-driven retro FPS inspired by PS1-era sci-fi horror. Set inside the Von Neumann Outpost, a research station carved into a drifting asteroid where systems are failing and survivors disagree on what happened, it wears its influences—System Shock 2, Alien Resurrection, and Doom 3—openly. Instead of chasing hyper-real lighting, it uses warped geometry, affine texture warping, and hand-painted vertex colors to recreate the warped, uneasy look of early 3D horror games.
Functionally, that low-fi presentation sharpens the tension. Players explore dark hallways, laboratories, and living quarters with few supplies and little hope of rescue, solving simple puzzles and unlocking new paths while the danger ramps up. More than a dozen NPCs with conflicting goals and "different version[s] of the truth" turn the station into a social maze as much as a physical one. Hyperstrange plans to release DERELIKT late this year, with the trailer also billing it as "Coming 2026"—a confusing note that nonetheless underlines one point: this is a long-term bet on story-driven FPS horror, not a quick nostalgia hit.
Expedition: Into Darkness: Dungeon Crawling Meets Extraction Loss
If DERELIKT speaks to fans of System Shock, Expedition: Into Darkness speaks to players who want their dungeon crawling wired straight into modern extraction shooter mechanics. The game takes classic dungeon exploration—foggy killing grounds, underground halls, exterior castle walls—and combines it with the popular extraction-shooter genre. A new trailer has announced the release of the first demo, following an early access period that has already cultivated a fan base.
The hook is simple and ruthless: take jobs linked to these dungeons, dive in for loot, and try to get out alive. Along the way, you collect treasure for equipment and base building, build out a skill tree, and assemble weapons from multiple components. The Steam page warns against carelessness while carrying loot from a dungeon, since death means losing all of it. That hard loss is the design’s core statement; it dares players to weigh greed against survival, recapturing the anxiety of old-school dungeon runs in a structure that extraction fans instantly understand. According to the game’s listing, players can try the demo now or wait for the official PC release, but the message is already clear: the roguelike loop is moving deeper into story-driven FPS spaces.
Kusan: City of Wolves: Top-Down Firefights with Shooter DNA
Kusan: City of Wolves pushes this indie trend from the first-person corridor into a brutal top-down cityscape. Developed by CIRCLEfromDOT and published by PQube, it is pitched as a high-octane hardcore top-down shooter where players battle through a brutal urban jungle to save Haru, a girl fitted with a city-grade atomic weapon. Rather than slow horror, Kusan leans on speed and aggression: chain kills, parry enemies, and spend earned Bolts on upgrades across firearms and blades to tune a preferred playstyle.
That flexibility matters. In a space dominated by formulaic twin-stick shooters, Kusan’s emphasis on parries and tailored builds gives it the texture of a character action game welded onto shooter foundations. Story also counts: players follow Jin, an ex-soldier turned gun-for-hire, through comic-style panel cutscenes full of corruption, violence, and fractured loyalties. With a demo and a full version already available on PC and consoles, Kusan is a reminder that the “indie shooter” label covers more than retro voxel headshots—it includes tightly authored, narrative-driven action that lives or dies on mechanical clarity instead of progression treadmills.
Beyond AAA Templates: Why These Shooters Matter
Taken together, DERELIKT, Expedition: Into Darkness, and Kusan: City of Wolves point toward a quiet but important shift in shooter design priorities. The new indie shooter trailers are not selling seasonal content or massive PVP ecosystems; they are selling specific fantasies: being trapped in a failing station in orbit around Saturn with unreliable survivors, gambling hard-won loot against permadeath in medieval dungeons, or tearing through a corrupt city as a gun-for-hire with a personal stake.
For ordinary players, the practical impact is a broader menu of experiences. You can choose methodical corridor creeping, where exploring dark halls and piecing together conflicting accounts is the whole point. You can opt for extraction shooter tension, where one careless move deletes a run’s worth of loot. Or you can chase top-down mastery, using parries and upgrade choices to refine your style. That variety is the real story: retro FPS games and their cousins are no longer niche throwbacks. They are a counter-programming strategy, proving there is room in the shooter landscape for risk, loss, and stories that do not need a battle royale to feel high stakes.
