Skystone reveals HODKA, a taiga scavenger hunt with a curfew
Revealed at Tokyo Game Show 2026, HODKA sends players into an unmapped taiga with a metal detector and a battered van, digging up scrap by day and beating the night fog home.
Skystone Games and developer FLAZM have revealed HODKA, an open-world scavenging adventure that trades the usual post-apocalyptic rubble for a stretch of unmapped taiga. Announced at Tokyo Game Show 2026 during the PC Gaming Show, it is heading to PC via Steam in 2027 and is available to wishlist now.
The premise is refreshingly mundane for a survival game. You roam the wilderness with a metal detector and a battered van, sweeping the ground for buried scrap and hauling it back to base for profit or parts. Every find funds the next upgrade to your engine, tyres, winch and snorkel, and every upgrade opens up terrain that was out of reach the day before. The catch is the light. Stay out too long and a dark fog creeps across the taiga, and it will claim its due.
Beneath that salvage loop sits a quieter thread. You are following an uncle's trail, piecing together where he went and what he found. That means earning the trust of locals who would rather be left alone, repairing washed-out bridges and clearing collapsed tunnels to push deeper into the map, and staying out late enough to learn what actually moves in the night fog.
Who is making it and when it lands
Skystone Games is the publisher founded by Diablo creator David Brevik and veteran Bill Wang, with a catalogue that already includes Mistfall Hunter, Tiny Bookshop, Crystal of Atlan, HELLCARD and ACECRAFT. HODKA will support English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese and Ukrainian at launch.
The risk-and-reward structure is the interesting part: every run is a bet against the clock, and the game openly asks whether you push for one more find or head home before the fog arrives to collect. It is a familiar tension dressed in unfamiliar clothes, where the vehicle you are babying is a van held together by hope rather than a boat or a spaceship.
Our opinion
HODKA's best idea is refusing to make the apocalypse the point. Digging scrap out of the ground with a metal detector and bankrolling the slow resurrection of a knackered van is a genuinely appealing fantasy, and a fog that ends your shift gives the loop a spine that most crafting games never find. The reservation is scope: an uncle's trail and a handful of mysteries can carry a ten-hour game or sag painfully across a forty-hour one, and FLAZM has to land that balance. 2027 is a long way off, but the wishlist button is free and the concept has earned a click.