You’re a veteran bounty hunter, known across the galaxy, chasing a crime syndicate you’ve been paid a serious sum to capture or kill. Then your ship starts falling toward a planet nobody has made contact with in 600 years. Nobody escapes it either.
That’s the pitch. Stranded, hunted, still on the clock.
If that does anything for you, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is your game. It’s the latest from Naughty Dog, and it’s promising a bounty-hunting epic where you play as Jordan, working her way across the hostile planet of Sempiria while hunting her mark: the “Five Aces” crime syndicate.
Two ideas nobody’s been using
Here’s the thing about bounty hunting in games. There’s almost none of it. Not properly. Crimson Desert has a bounty component, sure, but games that commit to the theme, that let you feel what it’s like to wear Boba Fett’s helmet or Mando’s, track a target and drag them back for the payout, are shockingly rare. The ones that get it right are rarer still.
The other underused idea is the one Naughty Dog already owns. Since The Last of Us landed, few games have come close to what it did, which is strange for a genre that everyone supposedly wants more of.
Intergalactic is aiming at both at once. Star Wars in its bones, Mandalorian in its shape, and that grinding, unrelenting isolation Naughty Dog has turned into a house style.
Trent Reznor is scoring it
Reznor and Atticus Ross are on the soundtrack. The visuals lean hard into 80s sci-fi. On paper it’s about as appealing a package as this studio has assembled.
Plenty of people are annoyed that it isn’t just the next Last of Us. I’d take this instead. A studio of this caliber building a new IP it calls its most ambitious and most expensive project yet is a far better use of everyone’s time, and it could genuinely end up as Naughty Dog’s best game.
There’s one problem.
We know almost nothing
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet was announced at The Game Awards 2024. That’s nearly two years ago. What we got was a CG trailer that sold atmosphere, aesthetic and, for lack of a better word, vibes.
No real gameplay. No story beyond the short description Naughty Dog handed over. No firm release date.
The studio doesn’t say much, so when it recently confirmed that performance capture has wrapped, that counted as news. It’s a small consolation. The release date still looks distant.
The reason to trust it anyway
This is the studio behind the Jak series and The Last of Us. Its track record is the argument. When Naughty Dog promises something, the belief comes built in.
It stings that the September PlayStation State of Play came and went without a second of gameplay. A trailer full of mood is a fine way to introduce a game and a poor way to keep the conversation going for two years.
But a gritty 80s-styled bounty hunt on a world that hasn’t heard from the rest of the galaxy in six centuries, made by these people, scored by Reznor and Ross? I want to see it. I want to see it moving.
Jordan is out there somewhere on Sempiria, chasing five aces on a planet nobody leaves.
