LOST RIFT
Vince Pavey had a chat with Laurent Malville, creative director at People Can Fly, about making their new base-building survival and extraction shooter hybrid game Lost Rift, which is currently in Early Access on Steam
H
ow do you describe Lost Rift to people when you tell them what you’re working on? Lost Rift is a new kind of survival game blending PvE
and PvPvE. You start as one of the only survivors left after a massive cruise ship travelling through the Bermuda triangle got destroyed by a supernatural storm. You wake up on the beach of a mysterious archipelago alone or with some friends in co-op. The game is split into 2 key parts. First, you have your own PvE world that you can explore at your own rhythm. This world is rich in secrets and content, but you will need to venture to other PvPvE expedition islands across the archipelago if you want to retrieve the most precious loot. When you go into an expedition, you will be matched to face-off against other real players who are also trying to survive in this world.
I mostly know you as a developer of really good narrative-driven shooters. What made you decide to combine survival gameplay and base building with extraction shooter scenarios? The game expands on People Can Fly’s roots as a narrative-driven shooter developer. With Lost Rift, the team saw an opportunity to bring the narrative worldbuilding we’re known for into the survival genre and combine it with deeply emergent, intense combat of an extraction shooter to deliver something new to players. We feel like this fusion of survival, base-building, and extraction mechanics challenges expectations, rewards curiosity, and makes players feel like every decision really matters.
What DNA does Lost Rift have in common with your other games that will make your fans want to pick it up? Lost Rift is obviously very different from our previous games. It is also the first time we released an Early Access title that we are building alongside the community way before a v1. But, if there is one thing that players should expect that’s in common with previous games, it’s that Lost Rift has visceral action, plus a commitment from our team to deliver quality improvements and new features to our growing community.
What are the progression systems like, and how do the survival and extraction gameplay systems propel each other forward? We currently have 3 main progression systems: the quests, the loot
40 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2026
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