Rising Tension in Hunt: Showdown
Vibes and guns
Reading time: approx. 5 mins
I’ve got Hunt: Showdown (hereafter Hunt) on my mind. I talk about Hunt, recounting the close wins and bitter losses I had playing last night, and I think about Hunt, trying to come up with new ways to play. I’ve even dreamt about Hunt (chased by hellhounds and guns that won’t load). I feel in my marrow, stinging, that Hunt is my favourite co-op shooter, and has been for some time. Time to crack open those bones and find out why.
Hunt is a very violent game, a historical first-person shooter set at the turn of the 19th century in rural Louisiana. I’m a fan of “rural area where terrible eldritch things have happened” as a setting, Hunt reminding me of narrative media like Old Gods of Appalachia or The Silt Verses in this regard. The end of the world has occurred for those living in the bayou; a supernatural disaster wiping towns from the map and filling the swamps with shambling undead. In this setting the player is one of a league of secret monster hunters who enter the bayou to bring back order, bullet by bullet. There are no survivors, only walking corpses and those who hunt them. The hunters don’t work en masse, operating under apocalpyse rules where any stranger you meet is not to be trusted. For the curious player there is much lore, unlockable in-game or dredged up from the Hunt wiki, to deepen the context of the bayou and justify the game modes. Beyond blocks of text, the world of Hunt is painted in shades of rot and mud to make each match visually interesting and further the fiction of an ended world.
The visuals of Hunt are subdued. They suit the tone of the game, full of washed out muddy browns and reds like dried blood. The bayou is a shell of its former self, buildings wrecked or burnt out and living corpses infesting everything. This links into the strong environmental storytelling, one of my favourite aspects of Hunt. In the spirit of an immersive sim the playspace gives the impression of a lived-in world, not of a combat arena dressed up in cowboy cosplay. The maps are divided into compounds that were once ordinary locations like farmsteads or small towns. These had been quickly fortified with whatever was at hand, doors and windows boarded up, before a bloody whirlwind swept all the inhabitants aside. Each area contains a juxtaposition between the mundane and the terrible; corn is ready for harvest, but the farmhouse is full of dried gore and the farmer is a shambling corpse with half a face. In certain secluded spots the bayou is very beautiful; trees sway in the breeze and shafts of sunlight sparkle on the babbling rivers, if you can ignore the smoke rising in the distance. At night oil lamps throw cosy pools of yellow light, and icy moonbeams cut through the forest canopy. The visuals layer on each other to build feelings of unease, and create instant depth whenever the player stops to take in their environment. You can never be sure what will be waiting around the next corner.
The unease is amplified by the scale of the maps. Hunt has three maps, but each is composed of multiple different interconnected areas that are large enough they would be considered an entire map in a different shooter. You’ll wade through swamps and stalk through woods, shielding your eyes from the shining sun in the fields and meadows. There are few areas that allow a player to see across the entire map, with use of elevation and scenery to block sight-lines. Games of Hunt contain up to twelve players, split into teams of up to three then scattered across the huge maps, much of each match then devoted to the rising tension as you are never sure whether you being watched through gunsights.
Given the muddy colours and restricted sight-lines, it is fitting that the main tool for finding players is the excellent directional audio. Every action in Hunt makes sound: gunshots echo over the map to give you advanced warning of players locations; footsteps make noise depending on movement speed and terrain, letting you know if someone is trying to sneak up on you; dry twigs snap while you creep through the woods. Seasoned players can also estimate how far away a gunshot is, and which type of gun is being fired, but it’s the small sounds that make the Hunt experience. You can hear a player reloading through a wall, and decide to attack while their gun is out of action; or maybe you hear an empty cylinder click and step out into an ambush. This builds paranoia, and allows psychological warfare by intentionally making noise to trick players into an ambush. In every game of Hunt, I’ll constantly second-guess myself at whether a creak is an environmental sound, a mob wandering a compound, or a player with a shotgun just around the corner.
In this eerie setting the core gameplay of Hunt is split into tense PvE downtime, and intense PvP gunfights. In the PvE teams pick up clues that lead them to the boss’s lair, fighting through undead mobs as they go. If you find the boss you first kill it, then “banish” the boss which alerts all players in the match to the location of the banish and begins a countdown. After a couple of minutes the boss drops two bounty tokens, which give money and XP if you can take them to one of the three extract points at the edge of the map. Holding a bounty makes your location visible on the map to all players, allowing them to track you and try and take the bounty off of your fresh corpse. Tracking down the boss works to funnel opposing teams into the same compound, and the limited number of bounties gives them a reason to fight.
PvP fights are therefore inevitable, but you can never be sure when or where the shooting will start. The shift from PvE to PvP is organic; you might spot another team when you glance out of a window, or purposefully follow the sound of gunfire to a fight in progress. Players can never fully relax as they move through the map, constantly paranoid that every environmental sound heralds the start of an ambush. The spice on top is the immense variety in the PvP. I’ve been involved in sniper duels, madcap bayonet charges, planned assaults on compounds, and desperate running gunfights to the extraction point – it depends what weapons and equipment the players have on them, and where in the map they meet.
For me, the draw of the PvP is its deliberate pace. I’ve gotten used to games featuring guns with high rates of fire, but in Hunt the cycle time of most guns is measured in seconds. Miss a shot and agonising moments pass before your gun is ready again, giving the battlefield plenty of time to dynamically evolve as players fire back or reposition. Faster firing weapons or large magazines don’t necessarily confer an advantage, as most guns will kill with two or three well placed shots to the chest. This feeds back into the tense atmosphere as the best advantage in a fight is to remain hidden and fire first, taking a player out of action with a sudden headshot before they’ve even seen you. Dying isn’t the end if you have a teammate left alive to get you back up,1 but getting caught unawares will put you on the back foot and could weaken your team for the rest of the match. This taught me to be ruthless, organising ambushes and shooting players in the back so they wouldn’t have a chance to get me first.
So gunfights in Hunt happens without warning, and dying either kills your hunter or weakens them for the rest of the match. This is the core of why I like Hunt; all of your short-term choices of how to move through the map and what equipment you use affect the long-term goal of surviving the match, with a good dose of uncertainty from the chaotic influence of other players. The final round in the clip is teamwork and communication. I play regularly with a core team, and surviving gunfights only works when we synergise. Multiple pairs of eyes and ears can scan the bayou more effectively for threats, and being able to plan how we move through the word elevates the experience. Hunt uses player pings to streamline communication, and help players indicate what they are talking about. In the midst of a firefight even how we talk changes, focussed phrases to describe where we are and what we’re doing as quickly as possible. To me, playing Hunt without effective communication is like playing without bringing any guns on a hunter – it’s something I have done, but it doesn’t work nearly as well.
The main downside I have with Hunt are lack of a compelling single-player mode; no strong story to play through, despite the presence of lore and environmental storytelling; unintuitive menu designs for the lobby; and bad luck. This last one covers everything from me having a bad play session to wonky match-making, because Hunt becomes very frustrating when it feels like you get killed quickly without a real fight several games in a row. Hunt also only has two real game modes. Above I’ve discussed Bounty Hunt, but there is also a battle-royale mode.2 Both modes can be played solo, and Bounty Hunt allows random team mates, but I suspect the game is best played by bringing some friends along to fill out a team. This might not be possible for everyone, and as the max team size is three friction could occur if more than this want to play at once. I understand the intention behind Hunt is to focus on a specific multiplayer experience, but would not disagree with a player who wanted more variety in gameplay or a single-player game using the mechanics and setting of Hunt.
So Hunt: Showdown is a game system that work holistically to deliver me a gun-fighting experience I just can’t find anywhere else. While there are flaws I am able to overlook them due to the strong core gameplay and the intense detail in the environmental design; in equal measures I enjoy the gameplay, setting, and aesthetics. The rising tension of Hunt: Showdown is best experienced first-hand, but be careful not to drown in the bayou mud.3
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Health/dying in Hunt is useful context for those who haven’t played. Each hunter has 150 health split into large chunks (50 health) and small chunks (25 health). Losing all your health causes you to be downed – in this state a living teammate can revive you, which causes you to lose the health chunk at the end of your health bar for the rest of the match. This depletes your total max health for the rest of the match. If you get downed with only one health chunk remaining, you are fully dead and can only be revived if your teammate is carrying a bounty token. If you survive a match after being downed, you can buy back your missing health chunks in the lobby using perk points, which can be more usefully spent on perks for your hunter (things like less weapon sway while aiming down sights). If a hunter dies or is not revived before the end of the match, they and all of their equipment and perks are gone forever.
There are also some single-player challenges I seldom play. They’re fine, but not why I’m playing Hunt.
I couldn’t find room in the main text, but the OST from Port Sulphur Band is just wonderful. “Rise Up Dead Man” is the Hunt anthem and it captures the pace and tone of a game of Hunt perfectly; but “Devil in the Churchyard” is my favourite because you can feel the despair of the bayou settling into your pores.