$9.99Species: Unknown Hunted in the dark, together
Take a contract on an abandoned ship, figure out which creature is stalking your crew, and survive the run.
Is Species: Unknown worth it?
Species: Unknown is worth it if…
- you want co-op horror where talking to your team actually matters
- you like identifying a threat before it identifies you
- you enjoy tense missions where the plan falls apart and you improvise
- you would rather earn your gear across runs than have it handed over
- you can accept a small early access roster of maps and monsters for now
Screenshots
Contracts in the dark
You play a mercenary sent aboard a derelict ship, and the job is never just a walk down a corridor. One contract asks you to extract a black box. Another wants a creature captured or eliminated. A third has you destroying the ship outright so the thing aboard never reaches anywhere populated. Each objective demands its own plan, and none of them are easy. The ship itself does a lot of the work: hums, beeps and mechanical noise fill the rooms, corridors look distinct from one another, and the sound design gives you real directional cues. Doors and computers make noise when you use them, and so does the monster. You drop into a dark engineering deck, flashlight up, hunting the last valve you need, and then you hear it move.
Five hunters, one question: which one is it
Every mission spawns one of five creatures, chosen procedurally, and each hunts in its own way with its own strengths and weaknesses. Figuring out which one is stalking you is part of the job: investigate your surroundings, gather clues, identify the threat, and you can proceed smoothly. Skip that step and you are improvising in the dark. Some threats resist bullets or cannot be touched at all, so shooting first is not always the answer. The right weapon, found at the right time, can push your team through or even put the creature down. Because the specimen changes every run, missions stay unpredictable: the plan that worked last time may be useless now.
Better with a crew
This is a game built around joining a lobby with friends and coordinating out loud. Proximity Chat and Radio mean distance and walls matter: a teammate around the corner hears you, and so might the thing hunting you, which produces both tension and chaos in roughly equal measure. Each person carries one tool, so the loadout only works together: a motion tracker to spot movement coming, a shield to block a deadly attack, a health syringe to patch someone up mid-fight, a mini-map to navigate pitch-black corridors. Strategize as a group, split the work, and talk. No one survives alone, though the game will let you try.
What should you know before starting?
What do you earn from missions?
Completed contracts pay out credits, which you spend on upgrading your gear, buying new tools, customizing your appearance, and gathering lore for your own creature museum. The higher the risk of the contract, the higher the reward. Fail, and the game is blunt about it: you die without anyone knowing.
How scary is it, really?
It leans hard into horror rather than action. The dread comes from sound and lighting: hums and beeps in the dark, a creature you can hear moving but not see, and the knowledge that it is hunting you while you work. Expect to hide, run, and lose crew members along the way.
Is there enough content yet?
The game is in early access, and the roster is currently small: one map and five specimens. What exists is polished, and the creature variety keeps runs feeling different, but if you need a large amount of content before buying, it is worth knowing the developers have more planned.
