Picture this: you’re a bounty hunter with a galaxy-wide reputation, hired for a hefty payday to bring down a crime syndicate, dead or alive. Mid-pursuit, your ship begins its descent toward a world no one has contacted in 600 years. And no one leaves it, either.
That’s the setup. Marooned, pursued, and the contract’s still open.
If any of that grabs you, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is aimed squarely at you. Naughty Dog’s newest project pitches a bounty-hunting epic starring Jordan, who fights her way across the unforgiving planet of Sempiria in pursuit of her target: the “Five Aces” crime syndicate.
Two ideas nobody’s been using
Consider how bounty hunting is handled in games. It barely exists. Not seriously, anyway. Crimson Desert does include a bounty element, granted, but titles that actually lean into the fantasy — the ones that let you feel like you’re under Boba Fett’s helmet or Mando’s, stalking a mark and hauling them in for the money — are astonishingly scarce. The handful that nail it are scarcer.
The second neglected idea belongs to Naughty Dog already. In the years since The Last of Us landed, hardly any game has matched what it pulled off — an odd gap for a genre everybody claims to want more of.
Intergalactic is chasing both at the same time. Star Wars in its DNA, Mandalorian in its silhouette, plus that relentless, wearing loneliness Naughty Dog has made into a signature.
Trent Reznor is scoring it
The soundtrack comes from Reznor and Atticus Ross. The art direction goes all in on 80s science fiction. As a package on paper, it’s about as enticing as anything this studio has put together.
A lot of people are irritated that this isn’t simply the next Last of Us. Personally, I’d rather have this. A studio operating at this level building a brand-new IP that it describes as its most ambitious and most expensive undertaking so far is a much better use of everyone’s time — and it might well turn out to be Naughty Dog’s finest work.
There’s one problem.
We know almost nothing
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet was unveiled at The Game Awards 2024 — close to two years back now. All anyone received was a CG trailer trading in atmosphere, aesthetic and, for want of a better term, vibes.
No actual gameplay. No narrative details past the brief blurb Naughty Dog provided. No locked release date.
Because the studio is so tight-lipped, its recent confirmation that performance capture is finished registered as genuine news. Cold comfort, really. Launch still feels a long way off.
The reason to trust it anyway
Remember who’s making this: the team behind the Jak games and The Last of Us. The résumé does the arguing. A Naughty Dog promise arrives with the faith already attached.
Which is why it hurt that September’s PlayStation State of Play passed without a single frame of gameplay. A mood piece is a perfectly good introduction to a game and a lousy way to sustain a conversation across two years.
Still — a grimy, 80s-inflected manhunt on a planet that’s been cut off from the galaxy for six centuries, from this team, with a Reznor and Ross score? I want to see it. In motion.
Somewhere on Sempiria, Jordan is hunting five aces on a world nobody escapes.