450+ "Very Positive" reviews: New action RPG launches on Steam with a 30% launch discount
Steam’s latest indie launch, Dark Hunting Ground, officially hit the platform on September 6 - and it’s already being dissected by a growing legion of ARPG aficionados. The game quietly sidesteps overproduced fantasy tropes, instead inviting players to tinker, experiment, and hunt monsters on their own terms in a moody yet minimalist world.
There’s no handholding here, or flashy cinematics to drag things out. Instead, Dark Hunting Ground has a lot of mechanical depth: every player concocts a hunter build from a huge web of skills, weapons, and modifiers. That web is the "dark tree" progression, and it’s designed for a lot of tinkering: according to early players, the real joy comes from mixing, matching, and sometimes failing on the hunt. The result is a fast-paced loop of trial, error, and improvement, as opposed to a slog through endless waves of trash mobs.
Levels are sparse but deliberate, and each encounter is tight and tactical. The atmosphere is pretty tense, the monsters legendary (and very much out for blood), and players state that every run feels like a bespoke experiment in survival.
Dark Hunting Ground did not appear on Steam overnight - it spent a full ten months in early access, first opening the gates to players in November 2024. During this pre-launch phase, the developer BingX religiously maintained an update schedule, where they regularly rolled out patches, new content, and solicited feedback from the game’s early adopters.
With a 30% launch discount and a relatively accessible price point ($9.09) - early Steam reviews are very promising. Community chatter centers around the sheer flexibility of build-making, and a content roadmap also hints at more updates to come. Translation tweaks and usability polish are still ongoing, but the main experience is earning a lot of praise from players, especially for gamers tired of overdesigned grindfests and wanting something more easy-to-get-into (and equally replayable).
Check out the Steam store page for Dark Hunting Ground here.
