Hunt the Night (PC)

Developed by the Spanish team Moonlight Games and published by DANGEN Entertainment, Hunt the Night is a retro styled action-adventure title, with a 2d isometric view and some dark gothic lore. Can this new team with a new game bring something fresh to the table?

Hunt the Night lets you play as Vesper one the members of “The Stalkers”, a group of hunters whom are out on the hunt some of the more vicious monsters in the game world, Medhram. The game has plenty of narrative, being foretold by the NPC’s you meet in game, as well as items you can find amongst your journey. As mentioned at the start, the game has some extremely strong gothic storytelling, despite the setting, you shouldn’t worry about many incomprehensible terms and phrases, everything is kept to a simple level to keep up with.

Medhram is quite open, with dungeons being unlocked as you progress, but backtracking and adventuring will help you find new areas, items, weapons and hunts will be available to you, hunts usually entail fighting a larger enemy and will give you certain items to help you on your way. The rest of the adventure will have you fighting through vast dungeons which will be difficult to get through, but you have a set of tools to help you out.

The game reminds me of other gothic action adventure games, mainly one by FromSoft but with an isometric viewpoint. The usual suspects are here, respawning enemies, challenging combat, giant boss fights. Combat was decent, with a good amount of weapons, these can be found throughout the world, and obviously can be missed. Personally my run used mostly the bigger greatsword but the twin daggers were pretty fun too, combat usually ranged from a few standard combos, but never really let you experiment with different button presses, the different weapons did give you a few different attacks.

As well as your primary weapon, a secondary projectile weapon is available. These usually come in the form of guns, or similar. These will help in other situations such as traversing the areas by shooting platforms to appear. Finally other powers are available throughout too, the first which you’ll find is a form of ghostly teleport, again these will help you traverse levels with more than enough challenging terrain, but the further you progress within the story, the more of these you will unlock.

On my first view of Hunt the Night, I was immediately drawn to the visual presentation. The in game visuals retain a strong retro aesthetic, with good pixel art used for all characters and animations look good if a little lacking. The dungeons especially look really nice and varied. When we get the few and far between cut scenes characters are well animated, with some very strong on display. Whilst not as visually striking as something like Blasphemous, Hunt provides a strong style with some comic book panel work going on.

The audio work in the game is probably the weakest of the game, however this comes with the notion that some of the audio tracks that we do hear are actual bangers, with some really compelling ambient tracks whilst venturing through dungeons, and boss fights have an especially good sound. The issue here is that we end up hearing a few of these over and over again, especially the main combat theme, it feels very overplayed.

If I was going to negatively mention anything to do with Hunt the Night, it can be a bit difficult, but games like this usually are on the more challenging side. Again games of this type are quite ambiguous so there’s a lack of maps which is also a struggle but there’s a point where games can be too difficult to navigate, Hunt the Night doesn’t suffer from this though.

There’s little to fault with Hunt the Night, visually its strong enough to hold it’s own, and the gameplay despite needing a few little tweaks is generally good stuff.