Hunt: Showdown is a harsh beast indeed, slouching into daylight after a few years in Early Access. A hybrid genre that combines elements of battle royale, boss rush shooter, and survival horror—it’s not exactly one thing, nor quite another.
It looks a lot like Far Cry 2, with the same flamboyant brown color scheme and malarial background hum, but while you’re moving around the game, it feels more like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, avoiding the open space and keeping your ears tuned in for nearby conversations. Its bright Monster Hunter insignia are really just decorative, like the whites of a killer whale’s eyes, concealing the gunsights that protrude from its belly. You can’t help but stare at it, even if you wouldn’t describe it as attractive. How could something so… multitudinous ever make it through the evolutionary journey? Unfortunately, you’ve searched for too long. Now that you’re there, it knows. Do not attempt to flee! The creature has a misleading girth. We’ll have to try to take it down.
If there’s one overarching idea that drives Hunt: Showdown’s peculiar—and, as it happens, wildly thrilling and captivating—combination of influences, it’s that predators eventually become prey. In this game, you may be shot from a hundred yards away for tripping on a twig while pursuing a zombie, and the traditional bossfight ritual provides no protection against the player throwing dynamite through a window.
In Hunt, you take on the role of patron to a “Bloodline” of bounty hunters who are all trying to make their fortune in the decaying, demon-infested Louisiana of the 19th century. In the primary bounty-hunting game, your goal is to locate the lair of a fabled monster within one of two rotting open world landscapes. To achieve this, you must use your magical Dark Vision to follow whirling blue sparks that lead to clues that will help you narrow down the search region. After killing and casting out the beast, you have to collect a reward and go to a map’s exit in order to finish the battle. You’ll encounter and avoid a plethora of lesser horrors along the way, ranging from common zombies that can be ignored as speed bumps—as long as you don’t miss the ones brandishing torches or cleavers—to more substantial foes like the Meathead, a one-armed monster that sees through a slithering entourage of leeches.
Slaying these smaller enemies will provide you currency and character XP, but every bullet or firebomb that is spent on a demon dog (and every bandage that is administered to your ripped flesh upon learning that the dog has companions) is one less enemy to take on the monster itself. Right now, there are three of them; you never know which one you’ll be facing until the game begins, so it’s best to avoid becoming very specialized when it comes to equipping weapons and supplies. Despite its size, the Butcher is a gentle option: a flaming hook-wielding porcine bully that is easily dispatched as long as you stay your distance. The cunning Assassin with the knife may even clone itself to deceive you, much like a lizard losing its tail. It can even dissolve into a swarm of flies to thread between the cracks in barns and windmills. The Spider, a ruthlessly agile wall-crawler that constantly appears to be behind or above you and whose rattling feet make your hair stand up, is the worst of all. The impulse to battle it while standing on a chair still exists, several hours after I killed my first one.
Luckily, bosses never leave their lairs, so you can always go outside to resupply, find some ammunition, or fire potshots through a break in the boards at your target. The sting in Hunt’s tail is that it’s a competitive event, so in reality, you can’t. Up to twelve people at a time may be present in the area, with groups of up to three players participating in each task. The HUD and map screen don’t initially indicate which players are enemies, but it’s simple to reveal your presence while reducing the number of NPCs. Moreover, similar to Turtle Rock’s sadly forgotten Evolve, every map is replete with evil ambient warning systems, like shards of glass, clanking chains, and hordes of irritable crows. Naturally, there are often a lot of loud explosions and shouting during bossfights. After you defeat the boss, you have to banish it in order to get the reward, which is an exorcism ritual that takes two minutes and marks your location on the map, giving opponents plenty of opportunity to surround you. Because both the rewards and their carriers are shown on the HUD, exfiltration is often the most difficult aspect of the game.
All in all, it’s a prescription for two distinct types of fear. On the one hand, there’s the disgust you have for what were once common people and animals: the males who seem like enormous, moaning lumps of decomposing coral; the women whose chests have split to show mosquito nests. As you play match after match, learning AI aggro ranges and discovering new equipment and abilities like blunt impact resistance or quicker crossbow reloads, this anxiety gradually fades. After the first ten Bloodline levels, hunters and their equipment are permanently lost when they are killed, although they are quickly revived; in between battles, a single free greenhorn recruit may be found on the roster screen. Although “Legendary” hunters can be purchased with real money, their benefits are purely aesthetic. You learn not to become too connected, even though you can always leave a game early if you think you’re completely outmatched.
That means it’s all about that second kind of dread, the all-encompassing, remorseless knowledge that somewhere in the sweaty blur of undergrowth, someone could be pointing a gun at you at any given time, reading your position and direction in birdsign, hearing the splashing of your feet (why in the world did you take that shortcut through the swamp?) and seeing hungry zombies twitching nearby. The only thing that can make you feel less of a terror than when you hear someone cough, turn around slowly, and see another player charging across a cornfield while wearing a microphone is the pure hate you feel.
Perhaps Hunt’s greatest accomplishment is to take the mentality of treachery and paranoia from the renowned massively multiplayer online shooter DayZ and cram it into rounds that last 30 to 40 minutes each and have a distinct, overarching rhythm of exploration, combat, and escape. That’s thirty to forty minutes on the outside. With twelve players on the field, it’s normal to run into opponents in the first few minutes. If fortune favors you more, you may be the only player who avoids being sucked into that firefight and ends up alone, killing the map’s inhabitants whenever you like. Naturally, however, there is never a guarantee that you will be the last one remaining. It’s best to play in pairs if you want to go all out since teammates may save each other from irreversible loss of a health bar section.
You learn to appreciate the cunning complexity of Hunt’s setting design via the anxiety of being observed. Every aspect of this dark terrain serves as the foundation for a tactical conundrum of some kind. Buildings may provide you with health or ammunition refills, but they also increase the likelihood that you will run against other players. while breaking cover, randomly applied foggy or nighttime circumstances reduce anxiety; nevertheless, while protecting a lair during the exile, the anxiety increases again; it is advisable to douse the lanterns before taking a chance on a peep out the window. Perhaps you might utilize those ambient alarm systems more actively, triggering a generator to muffle any noises you make as you creep up on a campground.
Particularly boss lairs make you imagine that they reside in two places. There’s the fear of overrunning them, especially in the face of the Spider, whose appearance is obscured, like the Xenomorph’s, by rusted farm tool thickets and tangled beam shadows. And then there’s the procedure of keeping them safe during or after a banishment, when you have to read the thoughts of the intruders and take on the role of the lurking dread. A zombie’s rage has been aroused by one nearby player, as indicated by a woman’s cry downstairs. Another one, maybe associated with the first, sounds like it’s tip-toeing over the tiles based on a creak above. A third is coming from the north, indicated by a far-off cawing burst. Should the dice fall in your favor, the player who is approaching might shoot the person on the roof, leaving you free to attack the first player below. However, you don’t really give players 1, 2, and 3 any thought. Player 4, the one you haven’t yet noticed and who you must always presume is there, is the one you should be concerned about.
Since Rainbow Six: Siege, I don’t think I’ve played a multiplayer game that creates as much anxiety. The disadvantage of Hunt, if you can call it that, is that it doesn’t really provide a counterbalance to that tension. The only way to play alone versus the AI is to go back and replay the game’s first training level (Crytek is working on a true solo PvE mode). Although Quickplay, which lacks bosses, is available, it’s not exactly the life-saving solution for nervous players. Instead, it’s a pretty clever addition to the character leveling mechanism.
In Quickplay, you are given a cursed hunter at random and have to find three different energy sources to trigger a mysterious wellspring and get off the map. While new weaponry in bounty hunter are limited to looting deceased hunters, exotic weapons are scattered throughout Quickplay. For each energy source you tap, you will also get a random talent. The outcome is a specially crafted hero, equipped with weapons and skills that may be above your Bloodline rank at the moment. If that character makes it through the experience, you may add them to your roster. One hunter can only ignite the wellspring and leave, which makes the game much the more frustrating when you’ve built your own Van Helsing and someone else pulls a rug away with a crossbow bolt that explodes.
Hunt: Showdown is a long-gestating game that started out at Crytek USA as a kind of Grimm fairytales take on Left 4 Dead. It stands in stark contrast to the multiplayer shooters that are now the talk of the town. Although every bounty quest offers up a different set of lethal shocks, it remains steadfastly one-note and very cruel. After that ten-level grace period, it really doesn’t care to make you feel comfortable. However, the emotion sparked by such complete impassivity is unmatched in most multiplayer games. The way your heart races when you hear gunshot echoes. The pit in your throat as you watch the Spider’s movements through a barn’s woodwork. Above all, the terrible victory you have when you aim your shotgun as someone peeks over a wall and a flock of birds takes flight in the vicinity.