Hunt the Night Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Hunt the Night is an ultra challenging top down action game that takes more than a touch of inspiration from the likes of Dark Souls in terms of its combat and exploration. That said, once you scratch below the surface though and it soon becomes clear that it is mostly From’s Lovecraftian horror Bloodborne that has really inspired Moonlight Games. Hunt the Night isn’t the first game to be heavily influenced by From’s imperious titles, and surely won’t be the last, so the real question is how does it play?

You play as Vesper, a member of the Stalkers – equivalents to Hunters or Witchers – and are tasked with exploring the land of Medhram when many of your fellow Stalkers are wiped out by a ferocious beast. While it’s rendered in a pixel art style and played from a top down view, the parallels to Bloodborne are clear, with the proliferation of eldritch creatures and Gothic architecture the most obvious visual influences, but it is the deep lore hidden within collectable ‘feathers’ that really seals the deal; filled as it is with unfortunate births, dark legacies, and cosmic calamities.

As you progress you’ll unlock a shadowy doppelganger you can call upon to complete puzzles and access new areas of the land. There are also a welcome number of puzzles that will require you to keep notes for combinations and codes, giving you an in-game reason to carefully read all the notes that you find.

Despite the presence of puzzles, the main focus here is frenetic combat. You find an assortment of weapons throughout your journey, but they all fall within a small number of types – swords, gloves, spears, and great swords. All of these have their pros and cons, but I found the higher base damage and