Fans of horror prepare yourselves—a new gameplay trailer for upcoming extraction shooter Rules of Engagement: The Grey State has dropped, and it’s given us the most unsettling look yet into the nightmare-fuelled universe Grey State Studio is building. The focus of this shiny new trailer is mostly on the game's co-op PvE mode and wastes no time getting under your skin, with fast-paced first person gameplay running through the horrorverse, coming face to face with endless hellish creatures including hordes of fleshy monsters, killer drones, and unsettling anomalies.
For anyone who missed the initial reveal: Rules of Engagement: The Grey State is a free-to-play squad-based shooter in which players take on the role of a Strider, an elite operative sent into an unstable dimension, coined the "Horrorverse", which is crawling with monstrosities and alien artifacts.
The setting is home to a graveyard of nightmares stitched together from the DNA of classic horror movies, novels, and the dark corners of modern internet creepypasta. Although there's still plenty to discover about what exactly lurks in the dark, the new gameplay trailer sheds more light on the disturbing landscapes and downright frightening enemies that players will come up against.
For example, one of the most harrowing scenes from the trailer follows a player being chased down the hall of a dimly red-lit hospital ward by a sentient washing machine with robotic tentacles, before a creature made of fingers latches onto their face with its human-looking teeth.
That’s just one of many stops of the video, too. It goes on to showcase a range of environments, like a creepy night-time swampland forest, a shipping yard with containers engulfed in flames, or a foggy hillside battle against an army of alien beings. We also get a glimpse of an ancient temple with flowing oil-like liquid swallowing players desperately running away. And to finish, we see a gloomy cliffside lighthouse scene with a huge octopus-like boss floating ominously in the sky.
It’s a lot to take in, and the trailer is still only scratching the surface. Boreas Isle is just one of the operation maps Striders will deploy to, while the Grey State itself will continue to unfold in new spaces and variations. Future maps and seasonal content will expand both the world outside the Grey State and the nightmares within.
Under the hood, Rules of Engagement pairs this sinister atmosphere with deep tactical mechanics. You'll deploy in teams of up to three with distinct classes - including the shield-and-hammer juggernaut Sledge, the flamethrower wielding Pyro, and the precise assassin Phantom into two separate squad-based modes.
In co-op PvE, squads of three deploy to Boreas Isle, fight monsters with firearms, special weapons, and devastating heavy firepower, and may find a way into the Grey State to recover valuable research materials. PvP will follow a different structure where squads hunt, grow stronger, and compete for the Vertex while contending with the creatures around them.
That split could be one of the game’s smartest ideas to get a wider variety of players invested too. Some nights you want the tension of outplaying rival squads; others, you just want to round up two friends and flatten a monster horde with overwhelming firepower. Keeping PvE and PvP separate lets each mode lean fully into what people want, while the shared Horrorverse gives room to switch depending on the kind of session you're after.
Rules of Engagement: The Grey State currently in development for PC, and will be free-to-play at launch. If you did want to see what the world has to offer, you can check out the new gameplay trailer now to experience the Horrorverse for yourself, and wishlist the game on Steam ahead of its release.
