ProbablyMonsters used to bet big on its games. Now it’s betting small. We’ll see if it pays off.
I saw the demos of both Nekome: Nazi Hunter and Crimson Moon last week at GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco. The things they share in common? Buckets of blood.
Nekome game director Jeronimo Barrera (and general manager of ProbablyMonsters) and his crew showed me a demo of Nekome: Nazi Hunter, while Mark Subotnick, chief product officer, showed Crimson Moon — two games coming in 2026. (Update: Only Crimson Moon has been announced for 2026).
Nekome: Nazi Hunter
Barrera is a former Rockstar Games leader who worked on titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto. For Nekome, he said in an interview with GamesBeat that the game’s focus is on a personal revenge story and its unique “gutter style” stealth combat.
The single-player linear narrative game was inspired by the Nazi hunting inspired by the films Inglorious Basterds and Sisu (the Finnish film, not the game). The game is in a pre-alpha state right now.
“World War II is heavily trodden ground in games, but nobody has really done a personal story of revenge like we are approaching it. We did a lo of research to figure out a new story we could tell,” Barrera said. “We decided to tell the story of a Romani character.”
The Romani people (often referred to as gypsies in the past) were among the first people to be marginalized and murdered by the Nazis. The lead character’s family was killed and he was left for dead on the side of a road. A man takes him in, takes him to the U.S., and something bad happens. Then he stars taking his revenge. On his very big knife is a Yiddish word, Nekome, which mean spiritual vengeance. The focus of the combat is on hand-to-hand fighting with the knife against the heavily armed Nazis.
“It’s a very powerful word, and it’s wrapped in the narrative,” Barrera said.
The “gutter style” is very much focused on how you have to strike to kill or you’re going to be killed, Barrera said. You fight with light attacks, heavy attacks, parries and dodges. Once you bring the enemies down with hits, then you engage in intimate finishing moves, said Danko Dimoski, lead game designer, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Players can sneak up on enemies and take them out one by one. But if they alert the guards, lots of trouble comes and you likely won’t survive. It pays to thin the herd first. There are multiple paths to get through each scene. When you cut the throats of the Nazi soldiers, it’s a visceral and bloody affair.
“Our game is gritty and grounded in reality, but you do have some special powers like being able to see through walls by using that power,” Dimoski said. “Officer enemies are more resilient” and they can raise alarms that draw more enemies.
There’s a progression system for the main character that allows you to unlock new moves. Barrera said that the team captured more than 700 actions for combat in a motion capture session.
“We want it to be deep,” Barrera said.
In one scene, you sneak onto a boat heading toward Tripoli, where one of the enemies is located. Along the path, you can destroy some of the Nazi hate imagery, and that unlocks new challenges which can give you permanent upgrades. The more you fight, the more experience you gain to boost your health and skills, Dimoski said.
In the scene, the main character escapes from a jail cell with the help of a friend named Ahmed. Then the Nazi killing starts. You can choose to go up to the top of a tower and take out a sniper or go after the guards down below. You can consume drugs that give you energy and gain focus power, which in turn allows you to fight better. You can pick up the sniper’s gun and pick off soldiers with it if you want to go loud, but you don’t have much ammo, Dimoski said.
If you take out a high-ranking officer, the Nazi grunts will get scared and allow you to isolate enemies and take them down. If your notoriety for brutality grows, you’ll scare off more Nazis through your reputation alone. This is perhaps where the player begins to feel like a “conductor of a symphony of violence.”
I think player will have to get used to the art style, which looks realistic at some moments and looks cartoonish in others. When you’re slicing a cartoon character’s throat, it’s creates a kind of emotional dissonance. Yet choosing to focus on an animated cartoon style enables the game to be made for a much lower budget.
The designers believe the stylized look allows them to set up the violence in different ways. You can injure an enemy, pick up their weapon, and attack them with it. You can do finishing moves. You can grab hostages and deal with mini-boss and boss characters. There are “grindhouse” and graphic novel elements that make the adult focus clear, and that makes it less jarring for the player.
Crimson Moon
Crimson Moon is a fantasy game set in a new universe where you play as a hero who is half human, half angel — a Nephilim.
The game, which was in an alpha state, is an action RPG that begins in a beautiful cathedral with a lot of colors.
It’s a co-op game, but you can play it as a single-player game as well. It is inspired by the album art of 1980s heavy metal records, like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath.
“There’s a few things that are unique about this. We do a lot of all the standard things that you’d want from an action RPG. But we also you start already as a Nephilim. You’re not a nobody farmer who’s going to go on a journey for Joseph Campbell’s traditional hero arc, right?” Subotnick said. “We start powerful. We think players want that from a player fantasy. They want to be like a badass, and then we make them work a little harder to be even more of a badass.”
The cathedral is a kind of player hub where you can start a mission and then come back after you make a run. It has rogue-like elements. You pick your difficulty and your loadout and your angel. You can customize as you progress, and you can fight with three different kinds of angels. One is a sword fighter, while another is more like a range fighter.
The color palette is rich, but it’s less cartoon-like than Nekome, perhaps because you don’t see your characters face, which is hidden behind a helmet. Your job is to go into different areas and clean them up, cleansing the environment of the hub at the same time.
You have a light attack, a strong attack, a roll, a parry and then shielded weapon effects.
“We want every weapon to have pretty awesome effects and a sense of power to it,” Subotnick said. “It gives you an incentive to keep progressing and finding loot.”
You start with three lives and can possibly gain more through progression. You have mana and health.
“We want players to come in and feel like there’s a reason to keep going. We want to widen the funnel,” he said.
The demo moved ahead to show me a boss fight with a very big character. There’s more story depth than I had time to see. You can find items and read lore, or skip it if you wish just to see action. You fight in various wards or districts. Three of them are built already.
In angel mode, it’s important to get the timing right. There’s a lot of gothic heavy metal sound playing as you slay the undead. The game is coming in 2026, but it has no release date yet.