A pixel-art Escape from Tarkov: Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L. opens a closed beta that starts solo

The extraction shooter has always been a genre about loss. Escape from Tarkov built its reputation on the raid that ends with everything you carried left on the floor for a stranger, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. taught a generation of players before it that the Zone gives nothing away for free. Most studios chasing that tension chase it in first person, with more polygons and more realism. Ice Quake Studios, a small international indie team, is going the other way: Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L. folds the whole loop of scavenge, survive and extract into a top-down, pixel-art world, and asks whether the dread survives the change of scale.

That question is now partly in players’ hands. Ice Quake has opened a closed beta, and it begins in an unusual place for a genre defined by other people: alone. The game is being built for both single-player and online PvPvE, where human players and computer-controlled enemies share the same maps, but this first test covers only the single-player side, with online multiplayer testing promised for a later phase. It is a sensible order of operations. Before anyone can betray you at the extraction point, the world itself has to be worth fearing.

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The Steam page casts the player as a Contractor, a Hollow Hunter of Unit 13, sent into a shattered, post-apocalyptic Europe to scavenge supplies, take on contracts and get out with the loot. Die, and the gear you carried in is gone. The announcement lists six regions with semi-procedural layouts and events, populated by bandits, raiders and the mutated creatures the game calls Hollows. Injuries are tracked by body part and treated with medical supplies, so a shot to the leg slows you down and an untreated wound becomes a countdown of its own.

The most distinctive idea is the gun. In the announcement, the studio highlights a weapon assembly system that builds firearms from individual components, and the store page puts it at up to 15 interchangeable parts per weapon, from barrels and stocks to triggers and scopes. Between expeditions, the hideout carries the slower half of the game: rooms to upgrade, crafting stations to run, and survivors to recruit and assign to jobs such as mechanic, doctor, cook or farmer. Tarkov turned its inventory screens into a second battlefield. S.U.N.D.I.A.L. seems to want its bunker to feel like a second home.

Access to the beta is by request. Journalists and content creators can ask Ice Quake directly for a Steam beta key, while players can apply through the game’s official Discord server or through PressEngine, the service that distributed the announcement. The studio has not attached a release date to the beta news, and the game’s Steam page currently lists it for Windows PC as coming soon.

Pixel art has a way of keeping a genre honest. Without photoreal textures to sell the danger, Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L. has to make a flashlight beam in an empty street do the work, and this closed beta is the first real test of whether it can.

Tags: Escape from Tarkov, extraction shooters, Ice Quake Studios, pixel art games, Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L., S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

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