First-person shooters (FPS) have long been dominated by franchises that wish to push the limits of both hardware and entertainment.
When games like Half-Life, Resident Evil and some others that brought novelty, games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Destiny, Doom, and lots more played kind of safe. While all of them center on polished loops of gunplay, ammo preservation, strategy and spectacle, in the age where players crave for something new and fresh, there is always room for improvising.
And Rules of Engagement: The Grey State, developed by Grey State Studio, wants to be something unique on its own.
Something that cannot be categorized into the same league as any of its peers.
Instead of making a good plot worth remembering for years to come, or making shooting enemies as the main idea, the rules is to just put a lot of franchises into a blender, hit the button, and see how it goes.
Rules of Engagement: The Grey State is literally turning the formula inside out, and giving it all away for free.
Developed by Grey State Studio under Tencent Games, the game is shaping up to be a haunting, tactical PvPvE extraction shooter that fuses survival tension, horror atmosphere, and class-based teamwork into one surreal experience.
It’s set in an otherworldly dimension known as the Grey State, an unstable realm teeming with nightmarish creatures, alien relics, and rival operatives all vying for a mysterious artifact called The Vertex.
Players step into the role of a Strider, an elite operative remotely piloting a bio-engineered shell, tasked with venturing deep into this forbidden zone, scavenging what they can, and making it out alive before the horrors or opposing squads tear them apart.
Unlike most extraction shooters that focus purely on tactical realism or military aesthetics, The Grey State dives headfirst into Lovecraftian horror.
Its environments drip with dread, the kind that gets under the skin rather than jumps out. Grey State Studio calls it a “horrorverse,” populated not only by abominations born from cosmic nightmares but also by modern myth, which include creatures inspired by horror films, novels, and even creepypasta legends.
From creeping through a fog-drenched forest and get attacked by Siren Head and a familiar species like the gargantuan Lamp Head, facing a hostile creature like Slenderman that can seemingly appear out of no where, encountering massive Cthulhu, fighting annoying creatures that can control its host through the head, like Headcrabs from Half-Life, as well as fighting enemies like Barnacles, also from Half-Life.
Then, overwhelmed by swarms of Bioraptors-like creatures taken from Pitch Black, caught off-guard by an Infected creature from The Last of Us, while discovering an artifact guarded by something straight out of The Thing.
It also borrows features from Scorn, invisible cloaking like the one from Crysis, and more.
With all the above in the blender, Rules of Engagement: The Grey State then wrap everything in an Escape from Tarkov-kind of setting, because after all, at heart, an extraction shooter.
It then sprinkled the outcome with a Metro topping, which can be seen with the sense of claustrophobic dread, post-apocalyptic isolation, and immersive world design that feels decayed, as well as some dramas from Counter-Strike.
There are also glimpses of influence from the dark mystery of Hunt: Showdown, and the cooperative chaos of Helldivers, and the vibe of Silent Hill.
In short, Rules of Engagement: The Grey State is an audacious mix of the familiar and the unimaginable.
The game’s structure rewards both caution and greed.
Each mission begins with a basic loadout, forcing players to scavenge weapons and gear in the field. Once players gathered enough loot, they can either exfil early for a guaranteed payday or risk everything to go deeper in search of The Vertex. That choice defines the heart of the extraction genre, and The Grey State leans into it with terrifying flair.
Grey State Studio, formerly known as Aurora Studio, has experience with high-stakes multiplayer design, having previously released Ring of Elysium in 2019. While that title eventually faded, its DNA clearly survives here: tactical pacing, tight combat, and a focus on environmental storytelling.
This time, though, the studio is fusing those elements with horror and mythology, giving the genre a distinct identity.
Players will be able to choose from several classes, each with unique abilities and playstyles: Sledge, the shield-and-hammer juggernaut; Pyro, the fire-wielding chaos agent; Phantom, the silent assassin who strikes from the shadows; and a mysterious fourth class that’s still under wraps.
Rules of Engagement: The Grey State is slated to be free-to-play on PC in 2026, with the developers promising no pay-to-win systems, except for cosmetic updates like skins and battle passes.
For a game this ambitious, that’s a surprising and welcome move. It feels like a deliberate statement: that creativity and atmosphere should be the focus, not monetization.
Whether it ends up redefining the genre or just haunting our Steam wishlists, The Grey State already stands out as one of the most intriguing shooters.
It’s eerie, ambitious, and unafraid to get weird: a game that dares to take everything we know about extraction shooters and drench it in cosmic horror.
In a world where most FPS titles stick to the same battlefield, this one might just drag players somewhere far stranger.
The internet is literally excited.
Similar to how Cronos: The New Dawn blends a lot of survival horror into time travel experience that confused the internet, Rules of Engagement: The Grey State is an FPS game that plays by its own rules.