The biggest other entry in this nascent genre I’ve just named is Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown. But I’ve been watching Tarkov streams and playing Tarkov for well over a year, and while developer Battlestate Games has taken a rather lousy view on the notion of adding playable female characters to Tarkov, the game it’s built is perhaps a peek at an emergent genre – one that I propose we call ‘zone games’. Escape from Tarkov has seen a recent surge in popularity, thanks largely to big-name streamers with huge audiences who tuned in over the first week of the year, incentivised by the promise of valuable in-game loot drops.
