NACON Connect 2026 ran on May 7, and out of a recap stuffed with vampires, werewolves, and Lovecraftian horrors, one game grabbed the loudest reaction: Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish. Polish studio Teyon — the team that pulled the surprise hit RoboCop: Rogue City out of a license most people had written off — used the conference to drop a new Pillars of the Hunt dev diary that finally answers the question fans have been chewing on since the Xbox Partner Preview reveal in March: what does this game actually play like?
Short version: a first-person, single-player action-RPG that wants to be a stealth game, a shooter, and a dialogue-heavy investigative drama at the same time, all set in an open New York City stalked by creatures from White Wolf's World of Darkness. And the dev diary openly admits the gun is supposed to be the last option, not the first.
An RPG That Lets You Talk a Vampire Out of Killing You
The most surprising line in the dev diary isn't about combat — it's about avoiding it. Teyon's design lead spends a chunk of the new footage walking through a single mission three times: once with stealth, once with violence, and once with a non-lethal gift of gab build that lets you de-escalate encounters using investigation clues you've gathered earlier in the case. Hunter character creation pulls attributes and skills directly from the tabletop rulebook, which means a Hunter who's specced into Persuasion and Investigation can finish missions without ever drawing a sidearm.
That's a wild swing for a studio coming off RoboCop, where social options were thin and the answer was always more bullets. Deathwish uses the same Unreal Engine 5 pipeline but stretches the simulation in directions Teyon hasn't really shown before: branching dialogue, romance options, and NPCs who remember whether you saved them, ignored them, or burned their family in a previous mission.
New York as a Hunting Ground
The Xbox Wire recap describes the city as an open and immersive New York rather than a fully open world — closer to Spider-Man-style hub districts than a single seamless map. Your home base is a divey old bar tucked away from the foot traffic, doubling as a research room where you tag suspects on a corkboard and decide which leads to chase next. Different boroughs surface different supernatural factions: vampires running corporate fronts in Manhattan, werewolves defending pockets of green space in the outer boroughs, and human cults pulling rituals in places nobody's looking.
Civilians don't know any of this. The Hunter tagline from the TTRPG — imbued, isolated, terrified — leans hard into a tonal shift Teyon is clearly chasing: you are not a superhero. The first-person camera puts a gun in your hands, but the dev diary keeps cutting back to moments where you're flinching, ducking into doorways, listening to footsteps. One quick scene shows the player tailing a suspect through a subway and getting cornered by a Sabbat enforcer. Survival there means running, not fighting.
Why This Studio Pivot Matters
Teyon's previous game, RoboCop: Rogue City, sold over a million copies in its first quarter and ended up on a surprising number of GOTY shortlists in 2023. It also pigeonholed the studio. Going from the licensed action-shooter people to the World of Darkness people is a major scope-up: Deathwish needs branching narrative, dialogue trees, faction reputation, an investigation system, and stealth — things RoboCop deliberately avoided.
The dev diary doesn't dance around it. The team explicitly says they wanted to make a game where the gun is the last option, not the first one. That's a thesis statement, and it's the reason this announcement is hitting harder than the average Xbox Partner Preview reveal would.
Release Date, Platforms, and Game Pass
Here's the part that already started arguments online: Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish is currently slated for Summer 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam. Steam's own listing pegs it specifically at Q3 2027. It's an Xbox Play Anywhere title and will be on Game Pass day one — which Xbox confirmed in the same recap that mentioned Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Rageborn, also coming to Game Pass in 2027.
The Bigger Picture: NACON's World of Darkness Bet
It's worth zooming out. Between Deathwish, Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Rageborn, Dracula: The Disciple, and the still-in-development Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, NACON and Paradox have effectively turned the next two years into a World of Darkness renaissance. None of these are crossover games — they share lore, not characters or studios — but the shared universe is doing real heavy lifting in marketing.
The risk: NACON disclosed in their recent financial update that several of their internal studios are facing insolvency proceedings, which raises uncomfortable questions about whether all four games will actually ship. Deathwish looks the safest because Teyon is independent and self-financing through its RoboCop war chest, but the broader portfolio is on shakier ground than the dev diary's confident tone suggested.
Still — for the next 18 months, anyone who has ever wanted a serious, modern, open-city game built on the actual World of Darkness rulebook now has a shipping date to circle. Summer 2027. Game Pass day one. Talk your way out of a fight or burn it down. That's a pitch.
