Sony Interactive Entertainment and Guerrilla Games just dropped a new teaser for Horizon Hunters Gathering’s second closed playtest, and the timing is doing a lot of work all by itself. The teaser confirms a four-day public test window of May 22–25 on PS5 and PC (Steam), with sign-ups already live through the PlayStation Beta Program — and it puts to bed, at least for now, the very loud rumor mill that had Sony quietly shelving the project after the first closed test underwhelmed in early 2026.
Horizon Hunters Gathering is Guerrilla’s first major non-Aloy spin-off in the Horizon franchise: a cooperative action game for up to three players, set in the same machine-haunted post-collapse Earth as Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, but with a much more streamlined missions-and-monster-hunts structure inspired (Guerrilla openly admits) by Monster Hunter and Destiny’s strike playlists. It has been in some form of public-facing development for over seven years, and the May 22–25 test is the first time most PlayStation players will get hands-on with the second-pass build.
Two new Hunters, both with attitude
The headline content addition for Closed Test 2 is two brand new playable Hunters, joining the three (Rem, Sun, and Axle) that anchored the first closed test. The newcomers are Ensa, described by Guerrilla as a “charismatic Oseram smuggler with a mercenary past,” and Shadow, a “Carja covert operative who commands a fearsome Stalker machine.” Ensa is, by every visible cue in the teaser, the team’s answer to the “close-range damage dealer with a chip on her shoulder” archetype that every co-op shooter eventually needs. Shadow is more interesting from a kit-design perspective — the Stalker is a stealth-focused machine in the main Horizon games, the kind that cloaks and ambushes, and giving a player character a tame Stalker as a mobile companion is a meaningful expansion of what a Hunter can be in this universe.
The three returning Hunters — Rem (the bow-and-trap precision specialist), Sun (the elemental crowd-control caster), and Axle (the heavy-weapons brawler) — have all received tuning passes based on Closed Test 1 feedback. Guerrilla has not detailed the specific changes, but the obvious targets from CT1’s player feedback are Rem’s trap arming time and Sun’s elemental status reapplication windows.
A new region and the Ashwater Valley narrative episode
The teaser also debuts a new playable region called Breakers’ Bounty — dense jungle and ravaged ruins bordering a scorching desert, which is exactly the kind of biome stitching Horizon does best. The region is the staging ground for a new narrative episode set in Ashwater Valley, where players are pushed to drive back a growing machine threat as part of a larger story arc. Crucially, Guerrilla has confirmed that Episodes can be played either in three-player co-op or in solo mode with NPC Hunter assists — addressing the most consistent piece of player feedback from Closed Test 1, which was that the matchmaking pool for higher-difficulty content was too thin to reliably find a full squad.
The teaser is short — under a minute — but it is the cleanest look at Horizon Hunters Gathering’s actual moment-to-moment combat that has been released since the project was first revealed. The fluidity of the parry-and-counter animations, the way the new Stalker companion phases between visible and cloaked, and the tone of the Carja-styled environment work in the back half of the cut all point to a game that has matured visibly since the first closed test eighteen months ago.
Two new difficulty tiers and Training Modules
The other meaningful structural addition is two new difficulty tiers for Machine Incursion, the game’s wave-based co-op mode: Hard and Merciless. Closed Test 1 only shipped a single difficulty band, which testers almost universally cleared in the first weekend and then had nothing to do for the remaining days. Hard and Merciless add the long-tail challenge that the test was missing — Merciless in particular is being pitched as a “completion run” tier with no waypoint guidance and meaningfully tighter enemy aggression timing.
Cauldron Descent, the dungeon-style mode that pulls directly from the main Horizon games’ Cauldron set pieces, is also returning with new layouts and modifier challenges. And there are new Training Modules — short, instanced, no-fail tutorial encounters that walk new players through Hunter abilities, machine weaknesses, and team composition. CT1 had a brutal onboarding curve. CT2 is fixing it.
The cancellation rumor that won’t go away
The reason this teaser drop matters as much as it does is that Horizon Hunters Gathering has been the subject of cancellation rumors for the last three months. Sony’s broader live-service strategy has had a brutal eighteen months — Concord shut down, the unannounced Naughty Dog multiplayer project was killed, and Bungie’s Marathon launch (per the impairment loss Sony just disclosed yesterday) is bleeding money. Against that backdrop, a co-op online Horizon spin-off that had only run one closed test in two years looked, to a lot of observers, like the next domino to fall. Push Square’s headline overnight was literally “Sony’s Not Pulling the Plug on Horizon Hunters Gathering” — which is the kind of headline you only write when the question was being asked seriously.
Game Director Arjan Bak addressed the project’s slow public cadence directly in the surrounding press materials, saying Guerrilla is “playtesting early and with small numbers to focus on the core experience and implement player feedback.” In other words: the long gap between closed tests was not a sign of a project in trouble. It was a deliberate choice to fix the things Closed Test 1 surfaced before showing the game again. That is at least the framing Guerrilla wants on the record.
How to actually play it
Sign-ups for Closed Test 2 are open right now through the PlayStation Beta Program on PlayStation.com. You need a valid PSN account, and you can register for either the PS5 client or the Steam client through the same portal — this is unusual, since Steam betas usually flow through Steam directly, but Sony is centralizing the registration to keep PS5 and PC accounts cross-linked for crossplay matchmaking on the test weekend. Codes go out via email in the days leading up to May 22. The test runs four full days, ending evening of Sunday May 25.
Bottom line
This is the second closed playtest for a game that has been in some form of development for the better part of a decade, and it is the first one Guerrilla is running while their parent company is openly bleeding money on other live-service bets. The pressure is real, the cancellation rumors are not unfounded, and the new content the teaser drops — two new Hunters, a new region, a real difficulty curve, NPC companions for solo players — is exactly the kind of pragmatic, feedback-driven update that suggests Guerrilla and Sony are still committed. May 22 through May 25, free to anyone who registers in time, on both PS5 and Steam. The Horizon series’ next chapter, in playable form, for one weekend only.
