Hunt the Night Review (TikTok: Tales.To.Tell.Tonight)
Hunt the Night is a diamond. Not only is this game gorgeous, but for it's art style and combat, it feels refreshing. The world breaths character. No two places feel the same and the horde of secret places hidden around the game is really exciting when you stumble upon them. I'd love to forget that I played this game, just to experience it again.
However, even diamonds can have their imperfections, and for a game that I hold in such a high regard, it has a few hard-to-overlook flaws. Despite the game being out for sometime now, it still has the occasional bug. Nothing typically ground-breaking, but small moments that will temporarily take you out of the immersion long enough to question what happened and then forget all about it. The achievement system is still bugged to this day, prompting the developers to create a patch that will re-register your achievement progress every time you visit Dalia's garden in the hub world.
But the biggest flaw in the design of the game, aside from the lack of scalability of strength despite all the weapons, is the very noticeable lack of a map system. The world of Hunt the Night is just big enough, with all it's unlockables that force you to back track, to really confuse this player on where to go, what to do and what I had already accomplished. You'll find some signs in the first couple of areas that point you to the direction of another part of the map but outside of that, and an NPC that gives you hints of where to do, despite me not knowing they existed til after I beat the game, you are on your own. This lead me to backtracking through areas I've been to many times over thinking "Oh, the library was over here. Or wait, no, it's over on that side of the map. Wrong again...." It frustated me enough to where I started a second save file, and it wasn't until I passed my six hour mark with a guide, that I finally started understanding the direction the game was leading me to and I began to get comfortable enough with the locations.
In the end, Hunt the Night is one amazingly fun game, just... maybe keep the guides on Steam bookmarked for a little while.