Hunt the Night Review (Captainrocket77)
I find myself in an oddly middling place with this review. I was left feeling ambivalent, yet want to call attention to the genuine talent on display.
The soundtrack is pretty and atmospheric, but most tracks were fairly short, and there weren't enough to avoid repetition. It's a similar story for enemy design, as well.
You'll see the same foes in every area with same powers each time (with a few area-exclusive exceptions). Worse yet are when said enemies' most common gimmick are damage-over-time debuffs. Poison-inflicters are everywhere, and you won't find a solution besides, "play super cautiously around them" for a while. If you're fast and observant, though, combat will be a fairly simple affair.
This game features melee as your primary weapon, projectiles as your subweapon, and magic aoe attacks as an...existent feature. Melee is either fast and weak, strong and slow, or viable. It may just be down to my playstyle, but anything not a sword or a gauntlet never really felt right. Guns also had their own problem of being slow to draw and clunky to use. You have to stop dead in place to aim, and the draw/aiming is rather slow to wake up and actually point where you want it to, sometimes just...not doing it. I love shooting NOT where I point my joystick! Overall, combat is engaging but repetitive and finicky. With the right gear and playstyle, however, you'll practically melt through bosses. Which isn't really that satisfying?
This game is listed as a souls-like, but once you know how to dodge a boss' attacks, they go down in barely more than a minute. At most. All of them (except for the minibosses that choose spawning minions as a secondary gimmick). It's a shame, since at least 2-3 of them have interesting fights. Or is that at most...?
The pixel art is very well made, conveying a gothic aesthetic well enough to maintain the feel of the world the whole way through. Personally, I wish the game had more cutscenes and the like, as it would've given the artists even more chances to flex their skills. As it stands, this game's aesthetic and worldbuilding are my favorite parts about it. This place has a history to be learned of in the lore side of things, and though the main character interactions are thinner than paper, said paper has lot to say.
I'd honestly rather see a novel or movie with this lore and aesthetic than a game. Both of the two endings were short and earned the exact same way, and one of them was far less interesting than the character dialogue hinted it would be. The player character has a solid motivation and an intriguing power, but the latter is barely explored at all.
This is an indie game, so while I refuse to hold back on things that felt unengaging, I feel must praise genuine passion here. There's vision, there's imagination, there's an eye for lived-in worlds. They just needed a better way to engage with them than the player got. Keep creating, keep learning. With some refinement and expansion in mechanics and character interaction, something memorable has potential to be born. as it stands, I've been ready for this game to be finished for a while. I'm out!