There’s a particular kind of confidence required to make a game like Hunt the Night. You need the audacity to look at Castlevania, Bloodborne, and The Legend of Zelda and say, “Yes – we can fuse these together.” Then you have to release that creation into the world in all its 16-bit-inspired pixel-art glory and hope it survives the comparison. Against the odds, Hunt the Night almost pulls it off. Almost. The creation of Moonlight Games succeeds in many of the areas you’d expect: the atmosphere is striking, the art direction is gorgeous, and the overall structure is solid. While it checks numerous boxes, though, it misses the ones that matter most, as it ultimately forgets to be fun.
The first thing that hits the one holding the gamepad is the atmosphere. The slowly rotting castle everything takes place in looks gorgeous, with its very specific brand of gloom making you want to light candles and drink some red wine. The chibi sprite of Vesper, one of the goth Ghostbusters called Stalkers, looks like the child of Princess Zelda and Alucard, the bestiary includes all sorts of small and large children of the night, and the first world’s boss is a giant undead wolf. The medieval fantasy locale Vesper will have to brave is decorated with enormous hooded statues, stained glass, candelabras, and black eldritch goo with tentacles and red eyes. Oh, and there are a couple of obligatory scenes of a giant full moon. Plus crows. Lots of crows.
The pixel art is magnificent, properly detailed and dripping with gothic excess. The story, which concerns humanity doing ancient bargains they clearly didn’t read properly, describes a realm trapped in a war between Day and Night, and naturally Night has turned up like an uninvited cousin who drinks all your whiskey, summoning monsters while at it. Will anyone care about the plot while it unfolds? Unlikely. Too generic in its premise and too boring when it comes to the actual writing, this isn’t really something one plays for the narrative and lore. In other words: on to the hacking and slashing!
Combat is the main thing here, and sadly combat is also where this starts showing its real cracks. You slash things, dodge things, shoot things, and occasionally explode things with a variety of dark powers. Most foes tend to eat lots of Vesper’s health in one bite, pushing this far from the land of other sword-swinging action-adventures and straight into soulslike territory. Hunt the Night, however, lacks the required snappiness and finesse expected. Every action feels as if you are moving through tar. Add to that an overall clunkiness and this will lead to plenty of aggravating deaths.
If all that sounds like a complaint about the challenge, no, it isn’t. This critic died like 15 times before completing Dark Souls III’s first non-tutorial boss encounter, but it always felt like a battle between a fierce beast and a player who didn’t learn from his mistakes. That’s not what happens here. Weird hitboxes, enemy projectiles laughing at physics as well as Vesper’s face as they pass through solid matter, guns that are slow to draw with the aim probably thinking the position of the analogue stick is a mild suggestion. Plus repetitiveness. The same critters again and again, bar some exceptions. It gets boring. Fast.
Beyond battle, Hunt the Night is a Legend of Zelda-like journey filled with some very light exploration and puzzle solving. Nothing special to comment on here. Find that jewel that goes into the statue’s eye, flip those switches in the right order, and so on. Simple stuff. Enemies are sprinkled around to ruin your day, of course, which will lead many to simply avoid them. Unfortunately, this has found another way to annoy. Many areas are filled with a dark goo of death, which one can avoid by dashing from platform to platform. For some strange reason, however, that simple move turns out to be quite unpredictable in its execution, with Vesper often failing to reach to the other side by an inch, without it being clear why that happened.
This review could go on and on, analysing other mechanics and systems, but at the end of the day the biggest problem is that, while it is easy to see the strong foundation underneath, walking through the corridors of the unpolished building on top just isn’t fun. Apart from the visuals, there’s a lack of polish everywhere you look; something that extends to performance as well. Every save feels as if the Switch is thinking of crashing for about five seconds, area transitions stutter like an actor forgetting his lines, hitting Skip during cut-scenes gives the system a minor apoplexy…and a couple of bugs run rampant. Better wait for a price drop.
