Harvest Hunt Review

The warden's mask hangs heavy in, a new horror FPS roguelite developed by Villainous Games Studio and published by Neonhive Games. Infused with grim pastoral horror elements and dark village lore, 's experimental concept ultimately feels a tad uneven, but ambitious and interesting all the same. At its crudest, it diverts into a kind of FPS for stretches at a time, but its frequent randomization of rules and tools makes for fun bursts of session-based horror.

The narrative-heavy roguelite is a rarity, perhaps most successfully explored in games like and , two very different titles with similar storytelling approaches. In both, players learn more about the world and its personalities through the act of playing, rather than at set points of gated progress. The gameplay feeds the story and vice versa, leveraging those familiar roguelite themes of chaos and tenacity to match the mystery, which supports a consistent whole distinguished among the genre.

Harvest Hunt is a fun, experimental horror roguelite with some great ideas.

tries its best to mimic iconic mixes of roguelite gameplay and narrative, as its players take up the mantle of a village “warden,” a noble but dangerous role made responsible for keeping a ravenous creature at bay known as the “Devourer.” For five nights – which play out as individual bookended skirmishes that form a «season» – wardens employ a range of stealthy or aggressive maneuvers and mechanisms to outwit the shambling beast, disable it, or just keep far from its clutches, a cat-and-mouse crawl through the cluttered, sometimes claustrophobic map of the Luna Nova village.

At its crudest, [Harvest Hunt] diverts into a kind of FPS for stretches at a time, but its frequent randomization of rules and tools makes for fun bursts of session-based horror.

’s graphic novel presentation seems a definite touchstone here, both in the active game and in the choices made over the course of a season. The first-person visuals are striking, though suffers