Hermit's Best Feature? Your Donkey Is the Inventory

"The main feature of the game is a donkey companion who follows the player and serves as an expanded inventory."

That line, buried in Hermit's Steam page, might be the most honest pitch I've seen for an RPG in years. Krabworks Game Studios isn't leading with a cinematic universe or a sprawling skill tree. They're leading with a donkey. And I kind of love it.

Hermit is a hardcore open-world action RPG set in a medieval fantasy world, following an order of outcast mages exiled for committing atrocities. Someone is now hunting them down, and players have to explore the mainland to figure out why. The setup is dark, but the donkey trailing behind you, hauling your swords and potions like a four-legged storage locker, gives the whole thing a grounded, almost comedic texture that most grimdark RPGs desperately lack.

A new gameplay trailer dropped today showing off magic mechanics and combat for the first time. Spells look varied enough to support different playstyles, and fights have a snappy, responsive feel to them. Weather, time of day, and seasons all affect spell power, so there's a tactical layer to when you engage enemies, not just how. Enemies have specific vulnerabilities, and weapons carry distinct strengths, so brute-forcing encounters with a single loadout won't cut it.

No Procedural Filler

Krabworks is making a point of saying the entire world is handcrafted. No procedural generation, no AI-generated content. Every quest, dungeon, and location is built by hand. In 2026, that's a statement as much as a design choice. With so many open-world games padding their maps with copy-pasted camps and algorithmically scattered loot, committing to hand-placed content is a risk, but it's the kind of risk that tends to pay off when the team can actually deliver on it. I'm curious how large the world actually is, because handcrafted and massive rarely coexist.

The feature list reads like a checklist of things RPG fans have been asking for: multiple quest solutions, NPCs that react to player choices, a house-building system, and gear that can be crafted, bought, found, or taken by force. None of those are revolutionary on their own, but bundled together with a world that doesn't rely on procedural shortcuts, there's potential here for something that feels cohesive rather than bloated.

A playable demo is already available on Steam, so anyone curious can try it now rather than waiting for a release date that hasn't been announced yet. Minimum specs call for a GTX 3060 and 16GB of RAM, with a recommended GPU of a 4070, so this isn't a lightweight project.

Small studios making ambitious RPGs is always a gamble, and Hermit could easily buckle under the weight of its own ambitions. But the donkey detail sticks with me. It's a small, specific design decision that signals the developers are thinking about how the game actually feels to play moment-to-moment, not just how it looks on a feature list. If the rest of Hermit has that same level of personality baked into it, Krabworks might have something special on their hands.