Nekome Nazi Hunter [Preview]: Revenge is sweet (and bloody)

We go hands-on with the violent stealth action revenge thriller

Somewhere along the way, someone thought we shouldn’t be quite as angry and passionate about giving Nazis their just due. It kind of fell out of the public discourse about the horrors that the regime committed over decades in the 1900s. Some folks want to forget how bad things actually were.

Yeah, no. No way, dawg. ProbablyMonsters definitely DOES NOT WANT TO FORGET.

Their new project has a title that should cause you to raise your eyebrows but only a tad, and only because you’re confused as to why no one has thought of it yet. Nekome: Nazi Hunter.

We know the job we have to do. We have to hunt.

We had the opportunity to take on an early Alpha build of the game at Summer Game Fest and it’s immediately apparent as to what this game is about: killing, destroying, and vengeance. A lot of vengeance. BRUTAL vengeance. We play as Vano Nastasu, a young man whose family has been murdered by Hitler’s Hyenas, a group of the dictator’s most merciless soldiers. Vanu’s grief is the driving force as he takes on Nazis for ruining his life. That’s all he wants to do now, that’s all his purpose is in life: to take down each and every one of the men who did this in the most bloody way possible. The game’s visuals are stylized to match that sort of late 30s/early 40s Art Deco approach, with bronzed colors, exaggerated proportions and very crisp clothes.

The opening scene of our demo starts in a dining room. Several Nazi offices are gathering together to plan their next steps toward global rule. They’re talking about their successes, they’re patting each other on the back. The table is ready for a perfect celebratory dinner, the commander says as servers start to bring in carts full of food, and calls out each of the officers for their job well done. The commander notes that one officer is missing from the table. Where could he be? In the bathroom? A traitor?

It’s at this moment that the server standing next to him, a young man in a tuxedo and white gloves, lifts the lid on the serving tray and reveals a severed head. Caked in blood, this shocks the others in the room. And that’s when we take control.

We have two attacks available to us: punch and stab. Thanks to being the server in the room we already have a big knife, and because this was meant to be a quiet affair the Nazis don’t have weapons on them. They cower and cry out “leave me alone, please!” but we don’t, we move around the room as they try to keep away, slashing and stabbing at anyone and anything. When the slower officers start to fall one by one, the Commander runs up to us, squaring away to attack, but our knife is bigger than his fists. As we’re taking him on, the door guards enter and surround us. Vanu has an ability called Focus Mode, activated by holding down both the trigger buttons, which can slow down time to let us plan our moves and target or block the enemies around us. Going into this mode is sort of Herculean, as we make short work of the remaining troops in record time.

That opening scene sets up the fast action that the game will provide, whereas the next section, essentially the opening of the game that spurs Vanu’s journey, is much slower and stealth focused.

We’re pulled back into New York, at a butcher shop, as Vanu’s uncle Harold is working and Vanu is tending to matter upstairs. We see Nazis enter the building, argue with Harold and stab him before leaving. Vanu, hearing the commotion, comes down to see Harold dying. The emphasis is clearly on emotion, as Vanu’s eyes are filled with tears that stream down his face, and his voice cracks while talking to his uncle one last time. “What am I good for? Why did they do this? We don’t matter to them.”

Harold, with his dying breaths, replies, “You do matter, kid. Go get our life back.”

And so we leave the butcher shop, head into the alleys and catch up to unsuspecting Nazis. Sneaking up behind them we have the option of either taking them on directly or quietly snapping their necks. Vanu learned a lot as a butcher, apparently! This leads us to an important headquarters building that houses officers, workers and printing presses. The Nazis were working to spread propaganda in the US in places like this, so it becomes the perfect location for us to hunt. And because it’s a place of mass production we can find a lot of that propaganda and paraphernalia all over the place, which we’re given points for taking down and wrecking.

We sneak around the rooms and floors, offices and closets, silently killing when we can but unafraid to just run in fists blazing. We don’t have a specific weapon here, but can pick up items now and again to use. If we’re discovered and surrounded, the combat can often display timed button presses to dodge and fight back, whipping around from one enemy to the next.

Perhaps the biggest identifier that this isn’t a game for the squeamish is that when we have someone down, when we’ve killed them, a button prompt comes up to “Desecrate the Corpse” that involves stomping on the Nazi’s head until it explodes.

It’s unexpected at first, because Vanu isn’t a muscle-bound juggernaut, but it fits in with the overall premise. This is a John Wick brutal fantasy of revenge, with often very video gamey moments and solutions. It takes the subject matter and plot very seriously but doesn’t take the actions to get there with that same seriousness because it does want us to feel what Vanu feels: incredible rage, incredible hate, and human suffering turned to unhinged power as an outlet.

Nekome: Nazi Hunter arrives in 2027.