It's no secret that lately, I've been spending every waking minute either playing Embark Studios' Arc Raiders, writing about it, or asking my friends to buy it immediately. The newly-crowned Best Multiplayer Game at the 2025 Game Awards, Arc Raiders was my first-ever extraction shooter, and it single-handedly changed my mind about the entire genre. So, naturally, I felt like it was time to try out other extraction shooters, but I knew I wasn't looking for something like Escape from Tarkov.

Enter, Zone Idle. A new, in-development browser-based extraction shooter that wears its Tarkov and Stalker inspirations on its sleeve rather proudly. It's a text-based game, too, which means I had no problems running it on my potato-esque work laptop as I boarded three different flights over the course of a weekend. It took a while for me to warm up to Zone Idle, and the game needs plenty of work, but right now, I can't believe myself when I say I can't get enough of it.

Zone Idle delivers text-based thrills straight from your browser

A looter-shooter that doesn't require $1000 worth of hardware

I came across Zone Idle on Reddit, where a user had posted about creating the game as a solo developer for the past few weeks, and finally having something playable to show for it. Naturally, curiosity got the better of me and once I loaded up the game, that was it. Three hours went by before I knew it, and I had an entirely new raider, inventory, and stash on my mind. It almost felt like I was stepping out on my love affair with Arc Raiders, but the two games couldn't be more different, despite belonging to the same genre.

For starters, Zone Idle is entirely text-based. It's not the kind of text-based adventure that will have you imagining everything from scratch, though — there's a full user interface for you to interact with that lets you manage your inventory, drop into different maps, buy and sell items, but it's all just menus. Once you do drop into a raid, a text overlay is all you get, describing the events around you and giving you choices to pick from about your next action. It's a rather quaint experience, and yes, it takes a while to get to, but for someone not looking to install a fully new game and dive into new systems and settings, a simple text-based, in-browser gaming experience is something that's made me more than happy.

The gameplay is, at its core, very traditional

Nothing any looter-shooter veteran would be unfamiliar with

It's nice to see someone attempt an extraction shooter completely in-browser, and use menus and systems alone to support it, but at its core, Zone Idle's gameplay remains quintessentially that of a looter-shooter. You prep your player's inventory, rummage around through your stash to pick what you need, get your meds, armor, and radiation suppressants in order, choose what weapon you're going to be running around with, and load into one of four maps, each of which has its own difficulty level, going from easy and medium to hard and very hard.

Once in the game, the text-based overlay acts as a narrator, telling you where you are, what kind of environment your character is in, and what's happening to them. You're going to be finding artifacts, keycards, better gear, and more loot for your character to take home, all while running into armed encounters with rogue raiders. These aren't other players, but completely computer-generated outcomes. Each new development comes with multiple choices for you to pick from — if a sniper shoots, will you try to drop a smoke bomb and hide behind the nearest cover with a 60% chance of success and 500XP, or try and shoot back with your pistol with a 15% success chance, but 3000XP to gain?

The entire time, your radiation level is a bar you'll have to keep track of, making sure it stays within normal levels. You'll run into mutants and even military checkpoints that could threaten to end your run, but thankfully, a safe pocket allows you to keep your most valuable belonging, lest something untoward happens, and you end up making the wrong choice. So far, nothing I've described is out of the ordinary for anyone familiar with the extraction-shooter genre, but Zone Idle stands out only through its presentation and novel implementation of these tropes.

I had to get creative to actually enjoy it

I didn't truly begin enjoying Zone Idle until my partner entered the room

I’ve found, to my utter joy, that the best thing about a text-based game, irrespective of its genre, is that text can be narrated. And my partner, who is already habitual of hearing me narrate the occasional short story instead of popping an Ambien, was more than happy when I began telling her about the kind of sector she was in, and what choices she had when she suddenly found herself face to face with irradiated mutants while being armed with nothing but a golf club. That is when Zone Idle truly became an interesting game for me, because I had suddenly found a way to transform it into a co-op adventure with my partner.

Currently, the only thing resembling multiplayer in this game is a global leaderboard and a trade menu, and while the solo dev behind it has been vocal about wanting to come up with a way to implement more multiplayer elements, I just happened to make it co-op early by having my partner merrily get my (her) character killed ten times over. She would just have me start over every single time, determined to make better choices, and thankfully, Zone Idle is also pretty forgiving in terms of loot loss upon death, so it’s never too expensive to take risks and potentially meet an early end to your raid.

Zone Idle strips the genre down to its bones

It's Tarkov without the gear loss and cortisol spikes

What makes this game click for me (pun intended) is how unapologetic it is in its endeavor to strip the extraction-shooter fantasy down to its very bones. There's no white-knuckle mouse aim, audio paranoia, or sweaty PvP encounters to contend with here. "One bad peek" isn't going to destroy twenty minutes of my progress, and the tension lives entirely in the decision-making process. You weight loadouts, routes, and odds, and then watch the outcomes unfold with a strangely hypnotic calm.

It captures the idea of extraction shooters. The risk, loss, and stash anxiety are all here, but they don't demand total mental real estate. As such, it turns out to be a rather approachable extraction shooter, and approachability is not what this genre is usually known for. I can play the game in bursts, let it idle, come back, and still feel happy about getting out alive. It's Tarkov energy without the cortisol overdose.

I found Zone Idle mighty impressive for a weeks-old title

It's fairly early, but that only works in the game's favor

When I say Zone Idle is a "new" extraction shooter, I mean it. The game is only a couple of weeks old, and that's also the amount of time the developer has stated they worked on it for. In its current form, it's just a playable build meant to test the waters and see if the concept is worth sinking hundreds of hours of development into. What's particularly impressive, however, is how the dev has been actively taking and implementing player feedback from every single person who tests the game and comes with feedback.

Right now, as I assure my partner that I'll be done with work soon, and we can go for another couple of runs on a harder map where she will have more riding on her decisions, I can only hope that the game continues development and eventually becomes even bigger and more popular. In its current state, however, Zone Idle is still a unique game that deserves your attention and doesn't waste it when you give it some.

Zone Idle isn't going to replace Arc Raiders for me, but it's got my respect

Zone Idle isn't polished, finished, or anywhere close to feature-complete. And yet, that's precisely why it's so compelling right now. It feels like catching a great idea mid-through, watching a genre I've only just begun to love with, get bent, trimmed, and reimagined in real time.

It's not like this game is here to replace Arc Raiders or Tarkov, but it isn't attempting to do that, either. Instead, it's going to coexist comfortably alongside these games under the arch of the same genre, and it's asking far less of me while still giving plenty back. For a scrappy, weeks-old browser game, that's no small extraction.