At E3 this year Crytek was showing off Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age behind closed doors, leaving us trapped in a creepy room made up to look like a swamp. It was appropriately gloomy and dark for the game we were about to sit through, which offers four players the chance to team up to hunt down various supernatural creatures, all while enjoying perhaps the best respawning mechanic ever seen.
The Reveal Trailer For Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age
This game has only just been announced and it’s still very early in development, so this wasn’t a live demo, just a video of a single match. This allowed us to see it from the third-person perspective of each of the players, however, and even in this early build it was obvious that this has the potential to be something special.
The video started off with a group of four hunters traversing through a Louisiana swamp trying to hunt down a Nightmare Witch. Hunt is set in the 19th century so the characters are outfitted with all manner of tophats, old-fashioned cloaks and awesome old-timey facial hair. Their guns are period-appropriate as well, although they seem to work a lot faster and more effectively than perhaps they did back then.
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This is a next-gen title coming to Xbox One, PS4 and PC that uses the Cryengine, and even in this early build the game is gorgeous, the swamp looking disgusting and slimy, incredible lighting effects only adding to the gloom. It's night and the hunters crept up on a little village in the swamp, a place full of seemingly possessed people dubbed ‘The Broken’. While the game obviously owes a debt to Left 4 Dead’s supernatural co-op mayhem, here it’s obvious that the game designers really like Resident Evil 4 as well. The attack definitely feels like that first big villager scene in the Capcom classic as you fight off crazed townsfolk, jumping through windows to better position yourself for combat.
Of course, having four people working together changes a lot, allowing you to better strategize and try and clear out the areas section by section, althoguh there are many different varieties of enemies to contend with, which can split you up from your party if you're not careful. One hulking bruiser did just that, smashing things left and right with a sledgehammer. When one of the players got too close to that monster the giant strangled him with the handle, eventually snapping his neck. The other three players teamed up and just unloaded on him and he finally went down, but their friend was still dead.
Respawning is handled wonderfully, though. After a player dies their teammates can save them later on in the game. Here they aren’t stuck in a closet, having forgotten how to use a doorknob. In Hunt they’re trapped in thematic ways- our broken-necked hero was found inside a coffin that was wrapped with heavy chains, pounding and yelling inside it until his companions came and shot the chains off, releasing him and letting the player play again.
Later on in the game another dead player was found deep in the swamp hanging upside down from a noose, and had to be shot down as well. It’s an awesome little touch that keeps things really thematic and exciting- it seems like you’ll feel like you’re genuinely rescuing them each time, and they promise many different versions of this throughout the game, unique to each level.
Fortunately you’re very well-armed with all manner of homemade weapons, and if you run out of bullets you can always pull out a melee weapon (like an axe) to handle things. At one point one of the players got his hands on a flamethrower and just lit up the night with it. Fire is a great deterrent for enemies and they were clearly having fun showing off the impressive fire effects, as he kept sweeping it back and forth to get the full experience.
The group ends up finding the Nightmare Witch inside a graveyard- she's wrapped in chains and has two giant stones strapped to her feet, presumably as someone's failed attempt to drown her. She flies around lashing out with her chains and even pulls a character into a nightmare world, an ethereal, blue-white environment that actually works in his benefit as he can keep an eye on her and keep shooting at her. The other players only see her ghostly visage momentarily as she pops up to attack, and it looked like a pretty thrilling battle.
Hunt will be procedurarly generated and offer up new challenges every time you play- new enemies and goals constantly changing things up and potentially offering unlimited replay value. The swamp is only one of many differnent maps and locations that will be featured in the full game as well, so expect more details soon.
HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age is scheduled to start a closed beta on PC later this year. You can sign up for a chance to join it at it at huntthegame.com.
