It's been pretty quiet from us for a while, and we wanted to explain why.
Over the last few months our core six-person dev team (we've grown, hurrah!) has been prototyping, testing and reworking the game behind the scenes. After playing it ourselves and running small pre-alpha tests, we came to a simple conclusion: it was not as fun as it should be.
When we first announced Hazard Levels, a lot of people assumed it was a shooter. That was on us. The early direction leaned too heavily into that space, and it was not quite landing how we wanted. The core idea was always about surviving unstable rifts with friends, but the way we were presenting it blurred that. So, we’ve done something about it.
Hazard Levels is still a 1–4 player co-op survival horror. That has not changed. What has changed is the feel of it. We are focusing much more on physics, creative survival tools and unpredictable moments between players, rather than traditional gunplay.
In fact, for now, there are no guns.
Instead, the emphasis is on tension, coordination, strange utility devices and systems that create chaos in ways we think are more interesting and more “us”. It is still horror. It is still dangerous. But it is less about aiming down sights and more about surviving the situation you have put yourselves in.
We want the game to feel intense, slightly absurd at times, and genuinely fun to play with other people. This was not a quick decision. It meant reworking parts of the game and admitting that our first pass was not hitting the mark. But we would rather do that now than push forward with something we are not fully confident in.
We have a brand-new trailer to share soon, and more details on our Early Access roadmap. If you would like to be part of the journey, and get involved in playtests, come join our Discord and have direct access to chat with the devs!
If you have stuck around despite the silence, thank you. It genuinely means a lot to a small team like ours.
– WI