Blight: Survival offers a fresh slice of its medieval zombie-slaying, after its developer took a break to 'rebuild our core systems from the ground up'

Blight: Survival, the third person hack 'n' slash where you carve up zombies in brutal medieval combat, is one of the most anticipated games on Steam. In fact, it recently surpassed 1.5 million wishlists, with only Subnautica 2, Deadlock, Light no Fire and Forza Horizon 6 having more.

Yet with such anticipation comes a lot of expectation, and players have been expecting Blight: Survival for a long time. The game was announced way back in 2022, and it's been almost two years since its developer, Haenir Studio, partnered with Dead by Daylight creator Behaviour Interactive as Blight's publisher.

But in a recently published trailer thanking fans for helping Blight reach its wishlist milestone, creative director Ulrik Langvandsbråten took a moment to explain what's taking so long.

"We're taking the time to make sure that it pays off when the moment comes to put Blight in your hands," Langvandsbråten says. "When we teamed up with Behaviour, we spent a lot of time digging into the original vision for Blight. It quickly became clear that if we truly wanted to do it justice, we needed to take a step back and rebuild our core systems from the ground up."

Basically, Haenir has spent a lot of time refining and improving the combat with the help of Behaviour to make it as physical and impactful as possible. "Combat is meant to be felt. From the first clash to the final deadly blow," says Ash Pannell, senior creative director at Behaviour Interactive." Naturally, this involves performing deadly combat finishers, which Pannell says are "just one part of our immersive combat system."

Certainly, the snippet of footage shown in the trailer suggests combat will have plenty of weight behind it. The clip of your character smashing a zombie's face in with his shield looks particularly gnarly. It'll take more than a dentist to fix that!

Blight has been cooking for a while, but Haenir has kept the community updated about its progress fairly regularly. Last May, the developers showed off a new location players will explore, the boggy, misty marshlands. Haenir also provided a sneak peek of a surprise zombie encounter on Hallowe'en, though it was mostly environment flyovers, with only the slightest snippet of combat.

While Blight: Survival still doesn't have a release date, you aren't exactly short on options for carving up folks as a medieval lad. Last year's Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 turned out to be one of 2025's best games, while January of this year saw the early access release of popular swordfighting sim Half-Sword. For more knockabout stabbery, you could also check out the wonderfully silly Chivalry 2, which still has a healthy community five years on from its initial release.