Watch a trailer for PUBG owner Krafton’s expensive-looking Korean fantasy game

Based on novel series The Bird That Drinks Tears.

Based on novel series The Bird That Drinks Tears.

In 2021, PUBG owner Krafton announced it had acquired the rights to The Bird That Drinks Tears, a popular series of Korean fantasy novels by Yeongdo Lee. Though little about the game has been revealed since, and the official website still calls it Unannounced Project, a cinematic “visual concept trailer” has now been unveiled.

The trailer does get a name: The Nhaga Eater, referring to Kagan Draca (following the website’s anglicized spelling), a central character of the books who hunts and consumes reptilian beings known as nhagas. That’s him, smoldering with generic rage as he severs a nhaga’s head in the trailer. The books also feature bird-people called rekkon and creatures called tokebi, inspired by Korean myths of mischievous pranksters called dokkaebi (who Rainbow Six Siege’s Korean hacker Grace “Dokkaebi” Nam is named after).

While it’s an expensive-looking few minutes of Unreal Engine 5 CGI, the trailer doesn’t tell us anything about how Unannounced Project will actually play. A job listing for an executive producer on the project did call for experience launching at least one narrative-driven singleplayer open world game, however.

Krafton owns multiple studios, and the one working on this project is Team Windless. Hollywood concept artist Iain McCaig (Star Wars, The Avengers) is its design director, and his art apparently inspired this trailer. “The team has spent over two years on building character and worldview on the artwork”, its description says. Presumably the game’s still a long way off then. 

In the meantime, a couple of other Krafton-owned studios have games coming out soon. Striking Distance is working on sci-fi survival horror game The Callisto Protocol, due out on December 2, and Unknown Worlds is planning to release digital miniatures game Moonbreaker into early access on September 29.

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