Ex-Battlefield devs’ Project Wight is about being a Viking-killing monster

Revealed at Unite 16, Project Wight is a first-person stealth-action game about playing as a monster species persecuted by pesky human beings.

How many monsters have you killed in role-playing games so far? Chances are, you probably don’t remember. For all you know, you could’ve been responsible for scores of digital extinctions of precious monster species (who only wanted to eat you alive). Project Wight takes a sympathetic look at the RPG monster by putting you in the shoes of one. Well, not literally. They don’t wear shoes.

In Project Wight, you play as a members of a intelligent species of creatures that has been hunted down and made nearly extinct by humans of the Viking variety. With your numbers thinned, your people being killed and tortured, you play as the underdog fighting for survival and perhaps even a bit of revenge. Okay, quite a bit of revenge, maybe.

It’s a fresh take on role-playing games, and developer studio The Outsiders takes inspiration from a number of diverse sources, including heavy metal album covers and surrealist poetry. The most prominent influence, however, is the 1971 novel Grendel, which retells the tale of Beowulf from the monster Grendel’s point of view.

The team also showed off the really spiffy-looking graphics via a little gameplay demo that shows off a young creature and an adolescent one. The former is weak, and has to sneak about to survive the Vikings looking for it. I thought it was a really nice touch that the Vikings actually seem to speak a Norse language—particularly for those of us not well-versed in Norse languages, it adds a layer of disconnect that further reduces any empathy you might feel for the humans.

No release date or platform has been announced for Project Wight as of yet, but the game is being developed in Unity by Swedish studio The Outsiders, whose members have worked at a number of Swedish developers, including DICE (Battlefield, Mirror’s Edge), Overkill (Payday) and Paradox (Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron). There’s no official website for either the game or the studio, but they do have more information and concept art at the Made With Unity page.