Riftwalker charges you for the door it puts in every wall

It is a gritty sci-fi bounty hunter RPG. You take contracts across seven lawless worlds and go after the names on them, following signals, clues and last known locations into settlements, ruins and syndicate strongholds. Some fugitives run. Some fight. Some have set something up before you get there.

The part that is not standard is the Void — a hidden layer of reality sitting between life and death that you can step into at will. Inside it you bypass defences, slip past security, flank a room that had no flank, and leave a fight you were losing. It is a door in every wall the level puts in front of you, and it is the one thing on the store page that is not a description of some other game.

It also has a bill. Time spent in the Void erodes your humanity, and the developer’s own line is that if you stay too long, something in there begins to notice. That sentence is what turns a blink button into a decision. The move that solves the room is the move that costs the most, and the game will not stop you from spending.

Around it sits an unusually generous kit. A tactical drone scans enemies through walls, disables security, and puts targets down with darts, gas bombs and a high-voltage taser. You can hack defences and turn them on the people relying on them. Void Time slows the world while you line up a shot, and movement is slides and rolls rather than cover. Between contracts you ride hoverbikes across open terrain after the ones who ran. The stated references are The Mandalorian and Dune for the frontier, Max Payne for the trigger.

The Genius of Prey’s Gloo Cannon is the closest thing to a blueprint here. Its argument is that one odd tool carrying combat, traversal, hazard control and improvisation is what makes a player believe the game will let them try things. The Void is being asked to be exactly that — the answer to how do I get in, how do I get out, and how do I win the fight I started badly. Tools that broad live or die on whether each of those uses feels different from the others, rather than one button quietly solving three problems the same way.

Morality in the Mechanics is the essay the humanity cost has to survive. It argues that karma meters flatten ethics, and that the sharpest moral design hides inside systems the player is already using — combat, money, stress, survival. Losing yourself in the Void only means something if it is one of those. A bar that fills up and unlocks a darker ending is a karma meter wearing a new coat. A price attached to the move you most want to make is something else: every hunt becomes an argument with yourself about how much of the level you are willing to skip.

The tracking half has its own trap, and Following the Little Dotted Line names it. Waypoints make an open world legible, and they can also replace looking, listening and working out a route with plain obedience. A bounty that promises signals, clues and last known locations is promising the opposite — that the finding is yours. Seven worlds is a lot of ground to make searchable by hand, and the gap between a manhunt and a delivery route is whether the marker turns up before the reasoning does.

Riftwalker is a solo project by [Ethan McKinnon](https://Riftwalkergame.com), coming to Windows, filed under Action, Adventure, Indie and RPG. Single-player, with full controller support on DualShock and DualSense pads. The release date is still to be announced, and the publisher line on the store page reads “Open to Partnerships”, which is a straight way of saying nobody has signed it yet.

The scope is the thing to watch. Seven worlds, open wilderness, hoverbike chases, scavenging, hacking, a drone with its own loadout and a second layer of reality running underneath all of it is a large amount of game for one person. The half that has to be good is the Void, because everything else on the list exists elsewhere and that does not.

If the appeal is an ability that is also a meter, Flick is the other one on this list — a horror game where the light you need in order to see also rearranges the rooms, and charges you every time you reach for it. Same bargain, much smaller room.