What HAWKER is, in plain language
Most days I get asked what we're making. The answer takes me a different number of sentences depending on who's asking, so I want to write it down once.
HAWKER is a roguelite action RPG that's also a shop game. You play a travelling merchant in a fallen world. You scavenge ruins by day, you sell what you find by night, and you have thirty days to pay off a debt to something that won't take "no" for an answer.
That's it. That's the whole frame.
The bits that make it different from the obvious comparison games are these. Your shop isn't a fixed building in a town. It's a caravan you push between outposts, and at every outpost the local economy is a little different. The combat doesn't end at nightfall, it inverts. The same character who was a normal scrapper in daylight comes alive in shadow, because of the deal that brought you back from the dead at the start of the story. And the deadline is real. Thirty days, counting down, with a lender who shows up on Day 30.
If you've played Moonlighter you'll recognise the bones. Dungeon by day, shop by night, profit pays for upgrades. We started building Hawker because we love that loop and we wanted to push it somewhere darker. So instead of a cosy village shop, you have a cart on the dirt at the edge of a dying town. Instead of a bank loan, you owe Ankou, the Breton folktale figure of death. Instead of a soft pressure to keep grinding, the calendar is a thing on the screen and it ticks.
Here's the texture that doesn't fit on a Steam page.
You spend a lot of the game pricing things. Reading customers. Working out whether the bone-handled knife you just dragged out of a flooded crypt is worth more to a hunter on Day 5 or a town watchman on Day 12. We didn't want a shop layer that was decoration on top of a combat game. We wanted a shop layer where misreading the market is how you go bankrupt while winning every fight. The economy in Ysward (the duchy where the game is set) is alive, and the people in it haggle differently when the candles flicker.
You also spend a lot of the game thinking about light. Every biome has a light meter that runs while you're outside. In daylight you fight more or less normally. In shadow your abilities surge. Push too far into the dark and you start drawing things that hunt by sound. The fights that feel best are the ones where you're trading position for power, ducking through a doorway to get the surge you need, then ducking back. We've been calling this the "doorway dance" internally for about a year. It's the moment-to-moment fingerprint of the game.
The world is grim, but the writing tries to be specific rather than dour. Ysward is a Breton-inflected dark fantasy setting, with all the bog mist and sea-fog and standing stones that suggests, but the people in it are recognisable. They want their tools sharpened. They want their kid back. They want to know if you've got anything for the cough. Dialogue is built on Ink (the same engine Inkle uses for Heaven's Vault and 80 Days), and conversations branch on what you sell, what you've done, what you've heard. We're trying for a game that takes the pricing tags seriously and takes the people on the other side of the cart equally seriously.
That's about as plain as I can make it. If you've read this far and the shape of it is interesting, the wishlist is what helps us most. Steam tells me when someone wishlists, which we read as "keep going."
Coming September 2026. Built by Tyson, Billy, and me at Tyrian Games.