Text-based and completely in-browser, this new extraction shooter has left me remarkably impressed.
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.
