Nazi-killing stories used to be as common in video games as revenge stories are today. As the name of ProbablyMonsters’ third-person action game implies, Nekome: Nazi Hunter brings the Nazi killing back into the forefront, but retains the vengeance aspect; it’s right in the name, as “Nekome” means “revenge” or “vengeance” in Yiddish. While at Game Developers Conference last week, I met with the team at ProbablyMonsters to get a hands-off demo of Nekome: Nazi Hunter.
In Nekome, you play as Vano Nastasu, a young Romani man whose entire family was murdered by Nazi soldiers. Consumed by grief and rage, Vano vows to take down the vile creatures who did this to his family. Nekome: Nazi Hunter is a linear, narrative-driven experience with an emphasis on hand-to-hand combat. Using gutter fighting, a win-at-all-costs close-quarters style developed in the early 1900s, Vano delivers brutal blows to his deserving adversaries. Vano brandishes a knife for much of the game, but he can also find others, including firearms and other melee weapons.
Watching the developer play through various sequences in a very early build of Nekome: Nazi Hunter, I’m struck by how responsive the combat looks. In one curated sequence, Vano thins the herd using bloody stealth takedowns before confronting the remaining officer. Officers are resistant to stealth takedowns, but Vano can overcome that through the skill tree, which consists of three paths: The Knife (for damage and combat), The Man (for character-specific upgrades, like the ability to perform stealth takedowns on officers or upgrading Vano’s focus bar), and The Tool (for improvised weapons you pick up).
ProbablyMonsters approached designing much of Nekome: Nazi Hunter as a way to tell emergent stories. That is most aptly shown in the second sequence I witness, which is more of a sandbox design. Using Vano’s focus, he can gain abilities like being able to spot enemies through walls, or one that I can’t wait to use: Focus Strike. Vano’s Focus Strike lets him stop time as he marks multiple targets’ body parts, then attacks them all in rapid succession, leaving the Nazis dead or debilitated. In a game where Vano is almost always outnumbered, this seems like one of the most useful tools in his toolbelt.
After taking out a room of enemies, Vano moves on to an outdoor area, with a sniper stationed on the roof. The developer charts a path to that sniper, since having armed Nazi eyes in the sky would probably make his life miserable, and if the gunman spots Vano and fires his rifle, his hopes of stealthily evening the odds goes out the window. En route to the lookout position, Vano burns various propaganda posters – a side-objective tracker pops in the upper part of the screen showing how much hate imagery and propaganda remains to destroy.
After reaching the sniper’s position, Vano brutally takes him out and assumes control of the rifle. Having access to a sniper rifle is obviously a powerful upgrade to Vano’s typical knife, but it comes with risk: Firing that gun will alert everyone of Vano’s presence, and Vano has no idea how many shots he has, a deliberate choice by the developers to really lean into the risk/reward aspect of picking up someone else’s weapons.
The dev demoing the game decides it’s worth it, so he targets an officer and pops his head from afar; it turns out there was only one bullet in that rifle, but Vano used it effectively. Normally, if you’re discovered, the troops will go into high alert and search everywhere, even calling reinforcements if you don’t take them out in time. However, in this scenario, Vano’s notoriety is high, and ushering that officer into a blood-soaked grave pushed Vano over the top, so several soldiers cower as they try and escape what seems like a certain fate. Some will run, others will hide, some will even beg for mercy. In my demo, they found no mercy, and I anticipate the results will be the same when I get my hands on the title.
Nekome: Nazi Hunter is still quite early in development, to the point that the developers assured me that the U.I. is still very likely to change before even the next time I see it. But even in this early stage, everything I saw told me this is a game I should keep my eyes on. We don’t know when Nekome: Nazi Hunter is set to come out, but it is currently planned to arrive on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.