Mistfall Hunter review

Mistfall Hunter wears its inspirations on its sleeve. A game that, at a glance, mixes elements of extraction games and Soulslike ARPGs feels like an easy play for a niche audience. In fact, if all you’d seen of the game were its launch trailer, you could be forgiven for thinking it was Elden Ring Nightreign. What we have is a competent extraction ARPG that still has some rough edges to buff out. That said, for about the same price as a large pizza and breadsticks, there’s plenty of fun (and frustration) for you and a couple buddies to enjoy.

Let’s be honest. You probably thought this was going to be a more affordable

Nightreign clone, and that’s ok. No one could blame you. Heck, elements of the game’s marketing have even made it feel like a FromSoft title. The game features some macabre-looking enemies, a variety of dark fantasy classes, and a maiden to guide you on your adventures. There are some notable distinctions that grant Mistfall Hunter its own identity, though, for better and worse. Hopefully Bellring Games will put in the work to flesh out the experience with time, though.

From the ground up, Mistfall Hunter is an extraction game, and that comes with all the positives and negatives intrinsic to the genre. Before each mission, you’ll sort through your warehouse, prepare your loadout, then it’s off to the expedition. Once in mission, you’ll kill monsters, pick up and work on completing tasks, loot everything you can get your hands on, and work to kill everyone that crosses your path. When you’re ready or out of time, you’ll work on safely getting out of dodge with all that sweet loot in tow. 

Before we get into the basic gameplay loop, I want to discuss combat. In a shooter, like Tarkov or Marathon, the premise is straightforward - shoot things and maybe use a couple of special abilities to help along the way. In Mistfall Hunter, you’ll shoot, slash, and cast your way to victory. Each of the six classes is given a unique set of skills with two viable paths. The Seer, for example, has the Revenant with its ranged casting or the Blasphemer with in-your-face mace-wielding skills. The Mercenary, on the other hand, can take a sword-and-board approach to protect themselves and their friends or throw caution to the wind with a two-handed hammer. Regarding the moment-to-moment combat, Mistfall Hunter feels less like Dark Souls and more like a standard third-person ARPG. You can’t lock onto enemies, and there’s no gear weight to affect your dodging. There are definitely times that feel Souls-adjacent, but Mistfall Hunter sets itself apart just enough to break that illusion…and honestly, I think it’s better for it.

Now, let’s discuss the gameplay loop. First up, the preparation phase. Here, you’ll sort through your warehouse, equipping gear and consumables to take on your next mission. Space is limited, so choose wisely. Once that’s sorted, double-check your skills and talents, making adjustments as you see fit. Regardless of your class, talent points can, thankfully, be refunded for free, so feel free to experiment! Finally, you’ll want to grab a drink from the tavern for some stat boosts, then queue up to embark.

After taking a longboat to one of two locations, the real action begins. You’ll explore, killing monsters and picking up loot along the way. You can also take on bosses, complete quests, and pick up in-mission tasks for some extra goodies. When you’re done, you’ll summon a bell creature, kill it, ring chimes at its withered corpse, and return home…assuming everything goes smoothly.

Things rarely go smoothly in Mistfall Hunter (or any other extraction game, for that matter). More often than not, you’ll end up in some intense PvP fights. Survive those, and you can nab the other teams’ loot. Lose those battles, and everything on your person is forfeit. To the victor go the spoils.

The game has two maps at launch, and while they’re functionally unique, they look almost indistinguishable, save for a few design features. Loot and enemies are different, of course, but the environmental design feels like it could’ve used more thought. Hallowgrove feels like a standard, rocky viking fantasy landscape, complete with houses, feasting halls, boats, and campfires set near mountainous outcroppings and caves. You have a time limit there, but you can take your time for the most part. Brandrgarde, on the other hand, is a series of rooms, almost like a prison facility or dungeon, that has a mist wall working its way in at regular intervals like a battle royale. You’ll constantly have to move to survive.

Extraction plays out differently depending on the map. Hallowgrove has stationary bell locations you can find on the map that unlock after a set period. You’ll activate a totem, which begins summoning the woodling. After a minute or so, it spawns, and you’ll have to kill it, using its corpse as a shrine. After ringing your own bell at the shrine, you can get out of dodge. The catch is that while you’re fighting the woodling, it’s fair game for adversaries, too, and each move it takes causes sound others players can hear. Beating the woodling doesn’t get you out of the woods, though. The chimes you have to ring to open the way home take 5-10 seconds of bell ringing, too, leaving you vulnerable to aggressive loot goblins. In the second map, Brandrgarde, bells spawn intermittently, and you’ll have to seek them out, kill them, and pick up a bell from their corpse. The cool thing here is that once you have a bell, you can extract any time you want.

Once you’re back in camp, you’ll be able to discuss completed tasks with NPCs and offload the inventory you extracted with (assuming you made it out alive) to your warehouse. You’ll also be able to spend your time and gyldenblod to prepare for the future: upgrade your camp, complete seasonal quests, buy or build gear and materials, and so on.

While the combat isn’t wildly complicated, it’s fun and satisfying. Tying that with the core loop of task completion and looting offers an experience I’m happy to pour time into. That said, the game has a laundry list of things that I feel like hold it back. 

First, having only two maps that feel visually similar is underwhelming. The game needs a couple more zones with some visual variety (icelands, volcanoes, something besides rocky terrain). The decision to have multiple character slots feels unnecessary, too, when all the gear is account-bound. It could’ve been streamlined so we choose which character to play as before each run with level progression intact. On top of that, by default, you can only create three characters and have to upgrade your camp to get more slots. 

Yes, cross-platform play is here, but cross-platform progression is not. I began playing on PS5, but it’s graphically inferior to PC, and it would’ve been nice to see my work there carry over. Instead, I bought a second copy of the game and had to start my warehouse inventory and camp progress from scratch. On top of that, ranged characters like the Blackarrow feel better suited to mouse aiming. 

There are plenty of quests along the way, but much of it is gated by brutal boss encounters where the stars have to align for you to progress. It’s elating to finally conquer bosses, but between the already-difficult fights, they can be interrupted by malicious third parties looking for an easy ambush. It can take quite a few tries to keep the story moving, particularly if you’re relying on randoms for help. On top of that, the game’s story feels like it gets completely lost in the sauce of the gameplay loop, making it feel like nothing more than a vehicle to keep you running expeditions.

As of this writing, Mistfall Hunter has a wildly toxic chat community. If the devs want to guide any of that, they need to put some guidelines in place. Beyond even that, I find the lack of a roadmap most concerning. I know Bellring is working to fix bugs, and they’ve started banning players for cheating/teaming, but they haven’t made any public statements on how they plan to support the life of the game in the future. At present, the best we can do is hope it’ll be in the best interest of the game and its player base moving forward.

Mistfall Hunter has a lot going for it. Class variety is meaningful, and the game’s core loop is fun. Some of their core design decisions are questionable, and I’m concerned about the future of the game, but if you don’t mind the repetitive structure, the game offers significant bang for your buck. If you actively avoid extraction games due to the permanent loss mechanics, Mistfall Hunter probably won’t win you over. If you enjoy big enemies, tense PvP encounters, or the risk/reward associated with extraction titles, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth though. Let’s just hope Bellring makes the right moves to grow the game and its community in healthy, fun, sustainable ways.