Hunt the Night was a game brought to my attention by a colleague on The Outerhaven. You can take a look at our reaction to its trailer on our YouTube Channel. The 16-bit pixel art looked great, and it did have a great ambiance of horror. I am lucky to have been able to get a copy to review!
Game Name: Hunt The Night
Platform(s): PC
Publisher(s): Dangen Entertainment
Developer(s): Moonlight Games
Release Date: April 13, 2023
Price: $19.99
Hunt the Night stars Vesper, a stalker with a sad past. Stalkers are human hunters who have learned the powers of darkness to kill monsters and as well as creatures of The Night. The Night is covering the earth in Darkness as they want to snuff out the Light. Vesper is working with a creature of the Night known as Umbra to stop total darkness from happening.
Defeating The Night
Hunt The Night throws you into a mansion being taken over by some ghostly presences. It is your job to then figure out how to best take care of all the monstrous beasts inside and reclaim it from The Night. You start with a normal sword that Vesper can utilize with quick slices to enemies. You also gain the ability to do a dash over dark pits as well as dodge hits from enemies. The mansion houses a variety of weapons and abilities you will have to become familiar with to kill some of the monsters. You will also find some moonstones, which you will be able to equip to Vesper to gain a passive bonus. There are also dark powers that work as special attacks or abilities that enhance your battle strategies. One other important item you get in your inventory is a gun, you can swap for a variety of weapons that are ranged, such as crossbows and shotguns. Along with your sword, you can use a broad sword, a spear, lacerators, and daggers. Lacerators were my go-to weapon as they had a good speed and some good range.
Later in Hunt The Night, you will get the ability to find weapons with added passives on their strikes. Some include life steal and causing status ailments. These become extremely important for boss enemies because this game is tough as nails. When they said that Hunt the Night was inspired by Bloodborne I was hoping it was only in its atmosphere, but nope, the difficulty is also inspired by it. You will need to dash, move or just find an appropriate play style to defeat the gallery of boss creatures that this game has in store for you.
Becoming the Night
The graphics of Hunt The Night are very stylistic. Moonlight Games not only created the game in a 16-bit style design, but they made the art style dark and slightly out of focus to create an atmosphere of direct horror. They play a lot with lighting and fog effects to also give some scary surprises along the way. A lot of the artwork that gets shown through cinematics or just the image portraits looks beautiful. They poured a lot of effort into making this game look and sound perfect for the aesthetic it is going for.
Stalking The Night
One thing that gets mentioned immediately before you start the game is that Moonlight Games recommends putting on headphones and having a controller. I can attest it is worthwhile to use headphones as the audio cues during boss fights are extremely important to help you maneuver and dash around the creatures you are going to be fighting. I started playing this game immediately on Steam Deck, thinking it was the perfect device to play on. It runs smoothly at 60fps, and the small screen compliments the artwork extremely well. I eventually moved over to PC and played with a controller, and it felt much better for timing dashes and shooting. The Steam Deck runs well, but I think it might be better to connect it to a dock and play it via a controller rather than play it via handheld.
Umbra
Overall Hunt The Night is a great love letter to Legend of Zelda and Bloodborne, you get the puzzles and exploration of Legend of Zelda, the ambiance, difficulty, and world-building of Bloodborne all put in a single 16-bit experience. However, if you are someone who gets easily frustrated over a difficulty or finding direction yourself, then I wouldn’t recommend this title to you. You have to put puzzles together in your head not just to help with the next step in the game, but for the cohesion of the plot itself (or if you are me and you take notes, it makes things easier).
Hunt The Night releases on April 13th, 2023, on PC and eventually will be published to modern consoles.
Review Disclosure Statement: Hunt The Night was provided to us by DANGEN Entertainment for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.
Affiliate Link Disclosure: One or more of the links above contain affiliate links, which means at no additional cost to you, we may receive a commission should you click through and purchase the item.
Summary
Hunt The Night has combines Legend of Zelda in its puzzles and exploration with Bloodborne in its difficulty and ambiance in a way that will attract fans of either series. Though it might turn off players who are not interested in a lot of difficult boss encounters.
Pros
- Great audio ambiance
- Beautiful 16-bit pixel art
- Very smooth controls on controller
Cons
- Difficult encounters
- Everything needs to be pixel perfect in execution
