Welcome to Indie Gaming Theater, where I buy a discounted, barely-reviewed indie game from Steam's stacks and take a close, honest look at it. For more details on what this feature aims to do, go here to check out my lengthy preamble. Otherwise, enjoy!

The Hunt

Yeeeeeeeeeehawwwwwww y'all, we got us a ten point big bull this week in The Hunt, developed by Bass Pro Shops (yes, really, and yes, I rolled my eyes too). So crack open a MGD, put on your best pair of boots, and let's kick the mud off this sumbitch, shall we?

Let me preface all this by saying that I realize the tangent I'm about to go on doesn't directly relate to The Hunt. Bear with me. You'll understand in a bit.

Montana is hunting nirvana. If you want to load up a rifle and kill shit, this is the place to do it. I don't like to go hunting personally. Part of that's the vision, part of that's because I'm not much of a killer, and part of it's because I just don't like a lot of the bullshit around hunting. I think the people who treat it with the respect and dignity it deserves are unfortunately outweighed by the people who treat it like sport or a chance to put a bullet in something. Sometimes a lot of things.

I understand and respect wanting to put food on your table. Right now, it's probably slightly questionable as to whether you'd spend more on all the expenses of hunting (assuming you own or are borrowing a gun, that's tags, bullets, gas, butchering, and time off from work if applicable, and it usually is) or just the price of meat you'd buy at a grocery store, which seems to be coming back down, at least in my area. But putting food on the table isn't something I'll mock and a full freezer is something I think everyone should have. In a state where a lot of individuals live in very remote rural areas where access to stores in the winter isn't always possible, it's smart to stock up.

Where I do draw the line and start to mercilessly mock people is when it turns into some kind of fucking parade. I don't like pictures of proud people next to dead animals. I don't like the minority of people who leave their carcasses in their trucks while they go into one of the local bars and drink it up in a celebration of their lordship over the animal kingdom with their high-powered rifles and scopes. I blow my fucking top when I hear people leaving the bodies to rot too long in their garages, strung up and ready to be butchered.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Admittedly, those people are a minority, but it's not an insignificant one. Dozens of cases like these happen every single day during hunting season - and beyond, when you have ranchers pushing for shoulder hunts that extend the regular hunting season well into the early months of the year so that they can reduce the elk, deer, or antelope populations. Even worse than the blithering "look at us, we are all that is man" hoorah bullshit of the hunting season are the psycho fucks who see a herd of elk or deer and just keep on firing, leaving piles of wounded and dead animals in the fields for the sake of their pornographic killing fetishes. There's a special place in hell for these sick assholes, and I sure hope the door slams on their ass on the way down.

I take advantage of my folks hunting. I'll freely admit that. I probably use, on average, maybe forty to fifty pounds of elk burger in a year. It's not that I have a problem with other people hunting. It's that I have a problem with the culture around it. In that regard, making a game based around hunting is a tricky thing. Creating an arcadey hunting game makes the concept of killing animals seem like a silly good time. Go too sim-like, though, and you wind up with something boring and vaguely preachy.

The Hunt tries for a balance of those things. The controls and basics of the gameplay are relatively simplistic and easy to pick up, but the aspects of shooting animals is treated with the seriousness of a sim. It's an approach I can appreciate, and one that might work in a better game, but The Hunt is freaking terrible.

You're given two ways to play - a season of hunting, or a more arcade-like free hunt. Initially, the only place you can hunt is the wilds of Washington, which looks vaguely like... well, every other badly realized forest scene of games from the early 2000s. It's all sort of blobby and badly textured, even for the standards of the time, and given that the coloring of the animals tends to blend right into those bad backgrounds, it does the game no favors.

Then there are the controls. The actual shooting and interaction with the environment is fine. You shoot with the left mouse button, zoom with the right, and move around with AWSD. All standard stuff. But the minute you're tasked with hopping on your four-wheeler, the game slides sideways. So do you. It's a chore to control the ATVs, which take off too fast, slide around like they're on ice, and bounce off hills that look as though you should be able to climb them given just the barest tap of the accelerator.

Those narrow pathways are also problematic. You're generally given two or three lanes to walk through, keeping an eye out for wildlife. Your walk speed is painfully slow, even for a game that's supposed to be about not spooking the animals. Oh, speaking of that, good freaking luck not walking right up on something and panicking the poor thing, because unless you catch the animals at a distance by spotting their pixelated asses on a ridge, you'll never see them. Kinda like me in real life, I suppose. The one bright part about the controls is that the tracking doesn't require much out of you. You're simply triangulating an animal's position using brightly marked environmental clues. That part's okay.

It doesn't help that you can't skip steps in the tutorial, which feels like it dragged on and on. Telling the player not to shoot animals without the proper tags shouldn't have to involve me wandering the back country on foot for an hour to peer through my scope at various deer and elk to figure out if i can shoot them. That's horrendously boring game design, even if I can appreciate the message behind it.

That's kind of the definition of The Hunt as a whole. It tries to be a respectful, proper method of teaching you the ideals of hunting done right, but it largely fails in its gameplay. The free hunt is slightly more arcade-like, but here again, you're wandering the same grounds you just saw in the season modes. There are a fair number of weapons to choose from, including bows, pistols, rifles, and shotguns, but since getting close enough to wildlife to use anything but the rifle is an impossibility, it's the only gun I ever used.

The Hunt is a bad game, then, but I still respect it for the message it tries to teach about hunting the right way. Unfortunately, that lesson isn't one that the audience it needs to reach is likely to hear, especially from such a mediocre regurgitation of a forgotten 00's game.

The Hunt is available on Steam regularly for ten dollars. There are better hunting games out there, or look into the real thing yourself if you're a decent individual who won't act like a murdering assclown.

The Rest

Bear With Me is something I wish fell into the parameters of this blog, but with over two hundred reviews, it doesn't qualify as an under-reviewed game. When I finish it, I might write up a review here on the site because it's a game that deserves your attention if you're a traditional point-and-click adventure fan.

It's not huge in scope. The first episode only takes place over a very small environment of about eight rooms or so, all within a child's house, with larger events hinted at outside. An elusive "red man" (nicknamed because of the red clothing he wears, not as an offensive slur or because he likes to hang with Method Man) has been torching places in Paper City, a town that may or may not be in the mind of the child protagonist. The house's stuffed animal residents (yeah, you read that right) think the girl's in grave danger, and safeguard her while she and her teddy bear pet detective roommate (named - you guessed it - Ted E. Bear) try to escape the house to investigate the red man and find her missing brother.

All of that sounds childlike, but it's more... hmm. I hesitate to call it magical realism, but maybe whimsical is a better term for what I'm searching for. It's also, curiously, relatively adult in its conversations. Ted will swear on occasion and some of the red man's brief moments make this a game that probably shouldn't be played by children.

It's mildly buggy - the game doles out hints by having the character talk to Ted, and at one point, he stopped offering up useful advice and insisted we got to the attic to talk to a stuffed animal whose conversation choices had run out. This was solved relatively easily by hunting down a FAQ and finding an object I'd missed in the environment, but it's still a notable occurrence.

I'm just starting up the second episode, which I like so far. The interpersonal relationships between these characters are surprisingly well written, and the universe has tons of promise. It reminds me in a lot of ways of the beginnings of Blackwell, which might have been short, but no less an outstanding start to an adventure series. I'm really looking forward to whatever else is coming from the developers, Exordium Games.

And that's about it. With E3 next week, I might not get around to doing one of these, but we'll see. Have an awesome E3, and thanks for reading.