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Hunt: Showdown 1896’s been going through it in recent months. Despite releasing a great new map in August and maintaining a pretty healthy playerbase on Steam, its UI update—criticised for its bad controls, confusing layouts, and prominent store tab—saw its score tanked to the tune of 10,000 negative reviews back in August.
Some complaints centred around the idea that Hunt: Showdown 1896 is getting all grotty and live service with its interface, with more visible microtransactions messing with the Wild West shooter’s vibes. It’s a trend I’m not all that surprised by (maintaining a live service game is famously hard) but leaves a second-hand distaste in my mouth (playing a live service game is famously annoying).
It’s something we’ve written about before. Every game with a battle pass doing as much of a Fortnite as it can, shoring up the coffers with recognisable crossovers in an overall erosion of whatever visual identities the game itself started with. Like, Call of Duty definitely has its own modern military artistic direction, but also Nicki Minaj is there now, so it’s hard to get immersed in the world artists work so hard to make.
Now Hunt: Showdown 1896 is dipping its toes into this same uglification trend, as Crytek has revealed a Scream crossover bundle starring Ghost Face himself, the first of its kind in the game. The awkward pairing has sent the game’s subreddit into a frenzy. “Today, Hunt’s identity died,” proclaims a mourner in a top-rated Reddit post, “I cannot think of a different IP that has less to do with Hunt.”
“The first time I’ll agree with this subs angry mob in recent months is with this,” comments a freshly radicalised player, adding: “They are f*cking with the vibes. Never f*ck with the vibes.” On the plus side, there’s been some very funny shitposting around the subject, which is always a plus:
Steam reviews aren’t faring much better—recent reviews have stayed “Mixed” and aren’t looking to improve any time soon. One reviewer writes: “Not only has the pace of the game been changed, but now the character of the game as well. I’m out.” Another notes: “It’s Ghostface from [Scream] … A character from the 1990s in a game that’s taking place in 1895/6.”
Honestly, Hunt: Showdown 1896 fans have my sympathies, here—the skin does look out of place. That iconic mask has an association with cheap halloween costume shops and candy-laden kids knocking at your door. The designers have clearly made an attempt to make Hunt’s version of Ghost Face period-appropriate, but the whole thing buckles under the weight of making the IP recognisable—to the point where it does look like some guy fell through a Hot Topic and landed in the alt-history wild west.
The lesson here seems that, unless you’re comfortable with eroding your game’s visual identity (like how Call of Duty can apparently just throw goddamn Groot in there) you’ve gotta stick to your lane. I think Dead by Daylight is a halfway-decent example of this: There are a ton of crossover characters, but they all pull from horror movies and games. Maybe D&D Vecna’s a little beyond the pale, but eh, he’s a lich, he looks like a zombie, it’s fine. The setting smartly justifies their presence there, with the Entity pulling in murderers from beyond the void to mess people up. It’s crystal clear, alas, that Hunt: Showdown 1896 doesn’t have that luxury.
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Kurt Indovina
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