Overview

NAKWON: LAST PARADISE (Korean title 낙원: LAST PARADISE, with the Sino-Korean word nakwon meaning "paradise") is a third-person multiplayer PvPvE zombie-survival extraction game built in Unreal Engine 5. Development is led by Mintrocket, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nexon Korea, with Nexon handling publishing duties. The game places refugees in a fortified safe zone in near-future Seoul, South Korea, where the survivors of a citywide outbreak gather to plan ventures back into the ruined streets in search of supplies, intel, and a way to keep their fragile community alive.

The subtitle refers to Yeouido, the island district that holds out as the last surviving safe zone in the wider Seoul setting. Inside the walls, the player is treated as a refugee, paying rent, climbing a Citizen Grade ladder, and upgrading a personal shelter. Outside the walls, the city belongs to the infected and to other survivors who may or may not be friendly. The game director has framed the design intent as a survival game first, where the player has to hide, run, eat, and live through a world in which the zombies are hunting humans rather than the other way around.

At a Glance

Studio and Publishing

Mintrocket is the Seoul-based studio previously responsible for the underwater action adventure Dave the Diver, released in 2023. On 11 September 2024 Nexon Korea formally spun the team out of its main organization into a wholly-owned subsidiary corporation, with Jaeho Hwang (the former game director on Dave the Diver) installed as the first chief executive. The move sits inside Nexon's broader "Big & Little" strategy of running smaller, higher-creative-risk titles separately from its flagship live-service projects, so that a stealth horror extraction game can be built with its own pacing and identity rather than being pulled toward a more conventional shooter.

The Steam store page lists Nexon as both developer and publisher; press materials credit Mintrocket as the developer with Nexon publishing and distributing. Game Director Jang Kyoung Han is the project's primary public spokesperson. No named in-fiction protagonists or recurring NPCs have been confirmed; players build a custom character from a roster of cosmetic outfits.

Setting

The world has fallen to an outbreak that overran most of South Korea. Yeouido, a real-life island district in central Seoul, has been fortified into a quarantine zone and refugee shelter. This is the "Last Paradise" of the title: the last place in the city, and possibly the country, where survivors can live without immediately being hunted. The map outside the walls is built around the Jongno district and includes named landmarks such as NAKWON Arcade and Tapgol Park, as well as a police station, an incinerator facility, two reconstruction sites, and a hotel.

Inside the quarantine zone, every refugee carries a Citizen Grade. The grade governs privileges, access levels, and which resources or districts the player can move through, and players are expected to earn money in-fiction to cover rent and equipment upgrades. The framing is deliberately uneven: human survivors can be a greater threat than the infected, and the game leans into the line that there is no one to trust, not even the living.

Core Gameplay Loop

Play is structured around a day-night cycle that splits time between the safe zone and the ruined city.

• Day phase:

  the player manages a personal shelter inside Yeouido. Furniture is placed and arranged, workbenches are upgraded, food and supplies are stored, and gear is crafted, repaired, or modified for the next venture out.

• Night phase:

  the player joins an expedition session of up to 16 participants and drops into Seoul. Objectives include scavenging, completing quests such as Key Resource Intel missions, and surviving long enough to reach a designated extraction point. Items carried into an expedition are lost on death if the player fails to extract.

• Encounter mix:

  every run combines special infected, regular infected, and other human players who may cooperate, trade, or ambush. Going loud on zombies is doubly risky because it broadcasts the player's exact position to anyone nearby.

Key Systems at a Glance

The closed alpha build that ran in March 2026 confirmed a wide content base across combat, character growth, and survival systems.

Trailer and Test History

The game has been shown publicly across several years of trailers, two pre-alpha playtests, and one closed alpha. The table below collects the milestones that have been confirmed in primary press materials.

Platforms and System Requirements

The only platform announced is PC via Steam, running on 64-bit Windows 10 or 11. No PlayStation, Xbox, or alternate-storefront SKU has been confirmed. The Steam store page lists nine languages with varying levels of audio and subtitle support, including English and Korean full audio. The closed alpha build advertised the following hardware targets.

The game is played from a third-person perspective. Per the May 2026 Q&A, the camera switches to a first-person view only while a firearm is in use; the team said it is not considering a full-time first-person mode, as it does not fit the intended core gameplay.

DirectX 12 is required at both tiers.

Release Status and What Comes Next

As of April 2026, the game is unreleased. The most recent reported launch window is 2027, framed against the wider extraction-shooter market and the desire to give the project room to land on its own terms; no in-game date has been officially announced. A future Dev Talk has been teased to cover a new map featuring a large shopping mall, building on the city expedition area used in the alpha. Monetization, pricing, season pass plans, and any anti-cheat partner are all currently unannounced.

Developer Q&A updates published in May 2026 added more shape to the launch plan. The team described a current launch target of four maps, building on the two maps (South and North Jongno) that featured in the closed alpha, with an ideal but unconfirmed goal of adding roughly one new map per quarter afterward. The same updates confirmed a planned skill-based matchmaking system that weighs looting behaviour, engagements, and survival time rather than combat alone, so newer survivors are matched with one another and experienced players with their peers. A karma or aggressiveness-based matchmaking system was ruled out. All of these are stated development directions and were not part of the playable alpha build.

New players coming to the wiki for the first time are encouraged to follow the Getting Started article next, which covers the basics of stealth play, sound discipline, and packing for an expedition.