In Blight: Survival, you navigate a crumbling medieval landscape, battling fungal zombies with your blade.

For years now I have watched Haenir’s putrid action-horror game Blight: Survival like a miasmatic knight errant squinting through the bushes at a peasant-shaped mushroom. I reached out to the devs for an interview a while ago, and received no reply. I wasn’t hugely surprised by their silence: Blight began life as a two-person project, and is a long way from release. Still, there’s been some ominous movement of late: the developers have unveiled a new biome and enemies, and are now fielding applications for very limited closed playtesting.

In Blight: Survival, you and up to three chums roam a squelching hinterland between two warring kingdoms. The conflict has bred a noxious brainrot that has reduced the resident villagers to sporing undead. There are also enemy soldiers to worry about, busily farming the wreckage. You’re a graverobber yourself, siphoning gear from the battlefield by means of “mechanics inspired from rogue-lites and extraction games”. Your higher goal is to reach and obliterate the source of the Blight. I’d have thought persuading the opposing kingdoms to stop spilling blood everywhere would have been the place to start, but this is a video game.

I will not say that Blight looks like High Art. I will not say that it courts thematic complexity. It is about hiking through the flyblown boondocks, murdering reanimated shepherds with a longsword. I don’t get the sense that any particular commentary on any particular war is being offered. Still, within its stinking parameters, it ticks a number of boxes for me. Firstly, “directional combat”, with players angling their sword to swing or parry. Directional combat is often horribly implemented, or treated as a source of comedy, but it worked in For Honor and it mostly works in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and I’m always drawn to the concept, because I like to feel like I’m literally hefting a sharpened metal stick. To get a sense of it, check out the reveal trailer from 2022.

Secondly, Blight has some appreciably nasty swamp environments, full of chopped chapels and gibbet trees. It makes me think of A Plague Tale: Innocence, but there’s some Hunt: Showdown here and probably some Dark Souls as well. I enjoy when games commit to being a swamp level, inasmuch as this is purposefully and viciously alienating a section of your audience in advance. I’m hoping the landscapes will be as enveloping as they seem, with plenty of opportunities to get lost. “Will you go back and secure your spoils or risk it all and push forward?” offers the Steam page. “How far are you willing to go?” That very much depends on whether I’ve got dinner on, Haenir. When I’m playing an extraction-style game the critical factor is whether the average round lasts longer than it would take a pot of pasta to cook.

Haenir’s puny ranks have recently been swollen by “several dozen full-time developers” from publisher Behaviour Interactive, including “level designers, narrative writers, programmers, UI/UX devs, concept and VFX artists, animators, sound designers, QA testers, directors, producers, and more”. I’m a bit leery of Behaviour, given the recent mass layoffs and closures, but Blight’s sweaty skirmishing feels like a decent fit for the creators of Dead by Daylight. Read more in the latest Steam blog post, including details about the forthcoming playtests. Release date as yet the game hath none.