The Axis Unseen Review (Zippy)
What we have here is a game with some elements of a first person hunting simulation—you skulk about quietly through the wilds, with patience and care, to get near enough to your quarry to take a shot—but also things take a different turn because the prey you seek is the supernatural, and they have no qualms about hunting you right back. It's the hunting experience but with myth and magic tossed in, a gathering of grisly and fantastic monsters, and a flavorful dash of metal.
You spend the game departing from your hub to hunt supernatural monsters and to explore the rocky, forested hills (at least to start) of the strange world everything takes place in, using a trusty bow and some magic to get the job done. Exploring gets you more equipment and more magic power, but brings you into contact with more frequent and more wicked things that lurk deeper in the land. The slope of the experience is nice and gradual: you begin with the basics and are able to stealth cautiously up to your first beasts and learn that a well-placed arrow will bring them down with one shot. Then you find a stomping creature where an arrow through the eye only makes them angrier. And then you hear the quaking earth as something even larger approaches and you find it shrugs off your piddly arrows like they were house flies. No worries; you're slithering away now, but you'll find that special something to fix their little red wagon, and when you do, the hunt's afoot again.
The game teaches you pretty well, since it begins with a stylish sort-of interactive montage tutorial to music, so you have this fast exposure to a lot of the mechanics up front, and then when you're in the game proper the tooltips will come up the first time you encounter things again, to remind you. It also helps that everything you need to know and do is pretty streamlined and straightforward. Even the HUD is diegetic, being a set of glowing runes on the inside of your bow and the back of your hand, which you learn to read pretty quickly.
The longer term goal is to make your way through the environment. (There's a lore aspect, but the game doesn't force you to sit through it; there's a helpful book that collects the logs so you can read them at your leisure, and it also has helpful notes on things like your magic and the monsters you've encountered.) The environment therefore serves as a big aspect of the game, and there's a lot to enjoy out of it. Stones crack under your feet, pricking the ears of unearthly horrors waiting around the next boulder. Storms roll in bringing down rain and fog, blurring the hills about you and turning the mud beneath to mush. The sun sinks and twilight trickles in, casting long shadows through the trees and a heavy glare into your eyes. Night falls, leaving you in the dark with nothing but your magical spirit light to show the way, and the grunts and sniffs of unseen brutes swirling around just outside your field of vision. Wolves howl, their tune carried by the climbing hillsides and poured into the valley basins, letting you know that, high and low, they are looking for you. In the still blackness, a sudden peel of thunder accompanies a burst of lightning, leaving you with a momentary image of moving shapes in darkness. Moonlight brings reprieve, letting you see in shades of blue the scurrying things that perhaps you'd rather not see, as you trek up and crest the next hill, on your way towards that burning beacon in the distance.
It's gingerly paced, letting your build yourself up to those peak moments where you're going to let the arrow fly. Or where the creature catches sight of you first and comes barreling your way. So step through the portal. The hunt is waiting for you.