This is, without any doubt in my mind, one of the very best games I've played in my entire life.

Down to brass tacks for those who need a

TL;DR:

The best way I can really explain what it feels like to play after climbing the learning curve, is saying it has the same core appeals as creative problem solving in immersive sims, feeling of tense & emergent behavioral interactions as social deduction games, & the low-bullets-to-kill of games like Insurgency.

The foundation is the excellent rules the game is built upon. In any good game, the rules & mechanics are designed based on the feelings the designers want to evoke from the player, & the dynamics by which they want the player to interact. In Hunt, this manifests in the way weapons & economy are balanced, the way information can be gained, masked, or ♥♥♥♥♥, & the systems driven nature of items & entities in the game world.

For example, for the majority of guns that fire regular bullets, it will take two shots to the chest in order to score a kill. This builds a set of assumptions that drive player behavior moment to moment. Just got shot? One more will most likely kill you, better get to cover. Was it less damage than what would normally kill you in two shots? They probably hit a limb, or were out of range for that gun.

This gives you information about the hunter that shot you. Not much, but information none the less. The reason that's important is because you now have a choice for whether you want to shoot them before they can land two more clean shots, or get to cover to heal & play it safe. This choice creates a small expression of player behavior, & represents the most basic version of what Hunt is built on.

Because the game has mostly low fire-rate weapons, most encounters can almost feel turn based in that you make a decision after every time you hit or get hit. Well defined rules help players to also make predictable assumptions. But the magic comes from adding systems based items, & an information driven game world, so lets get to that.

I'm going to use boss-clues as an example, & a couple of things that function similarly after. Compounds will have clues you can grab (it stays put, but you "grab" information by interacting with them), this will grey out a section of the map for your team, narrowing down your search to find where the map's PvE boss is located. Sometimes the compound you grab a clue in won't be part of the area grey'd out from picking it up, & will just have it's name crossed out. There rarely can be 2 clues at 1 compound. Clues in grey parts of the map cannot be grabbed. You can still grab clues other teams already grabbed. The visible appearance of a clue will change for ALL teams if ANY team has grabbed it before. Now for the cool part: you can hear/see the glow of a clue if your team can still grab it, & if the glow turns red & growls that means two players not on the same team are both within range of the clue.

So, if you just grabbed a clue at a compound, a lot of things can happen. It might start glowing, but you can't see or hear that, but the enemy can. There might be TWO clues, & the enemy is coming from your side of the compound, so the other clue doesn't glow until they are very close, but THEY heard your grabbed clue glowing first from further away.

If the compound has a clue you haven't grabbed, but cannot because it is in a grey'd out area, you can still see if the clue has been grabbed before by another team to know if one is likely still in the compound or was there recently.

There are two other ways similar to this to detect players.

Event totems glow red when two enemy players are both near it. Shooting or grabbing them makes a loud sound (much louder if shot) & then physically removes that specific totem entirely for all teams.

Then there's boss-flash. You can see blue clue glows VERY far away & through walls using a mechanic called "dark sight". It lets you know where to go without opening the map, & shows you where in a compound the clue(s) are. Similarly, when you are very close to the boss room, the boss can glow blue so you can see where inside that building the boss is located. When you use dark sight, you lower your guns, & the world gets much darker to make the glowing stand out. While you are doing this, the icon of the boss in the top left corner will flash if it's close enough. When this happens, if the flash is white, there are no enemies nearby, but if it's red there are. Walking into the boss room at least once also increases the range at which you can see the flash.

So clues cannot be physically removed from the world & store information in their appearance, their glow visibility is asymmetric between teams, & their warning is automatic. The totems can be physically removed from the world & give sound cues as removal occurs, their glow visibility is symmetric for all teams, & their warning is also automatic. Bosses store information in their health-bar (visible if you've been in their lair), their flash is symmetrical for all players but it has extended range for people who have entered the boss room before, & their warning is manual.

Items behave according to their properties, rather than pre-programmed interactions. So a sticky bomb (dynamite covered in spikes) thrown in water will have it's fuse snuffed out, but still float in the water. Nearby explosions above water (including explosive bullets) will still make contact with the sticky bomb and set it off. Frag bombs will not float, thus will not be set off, but will be extinguished. Poison-wasps-jars can be thrown into the water, & will float, but won't break upon hitting water instead of land, however a bullet, razor tripwire trap, or melee can still break the glass, activating it.

These rules are the learning curve of the game as much as aim or movement. Learning item logic, weapon characteristics, sound cues, information systems, all change what game you're actually playing, and there are many more examples for each category than those I gave so far. Learning these, you can then gamble based on your enemy's behavior, what you think they know, your items on hand, the environment, & the situation. You start using these tools to manipulate how the other teams act, & come up with clever ways to use items/the world in unconventional ways or pairings.

As you approach the next compound, you see a clue glow red from further than you could trigger it, realizing two teams are there. You throw a decoy item (scrap metal) at a chicken pen to spook the chickens near an enemy you spot, getting them caught by the other team & starting a fight. You sit out of range & prepare. You use a silenced rifle to shoot all the totems, keep track of enemy health, and place a trap. After one team wins, they grab the clue, & you sneak in after them knowing they can't hear/see the glow anymore, thinking it's still safe.

With an easy one-shot-kill to the chest of the injured enemy who was searching the compound for a medkit, you let out a bone-rattling yee-haw over proximity chat. Scared & low on ammo, the remaining two run away from the compound & towards the river --where you already hid a razor tripwire trap next to a wasp jar while they fighting the other team. Slowed by the trap & the water, bleeding from the razorwire, and being stung by a thousand angry poisonous wasps, they panic and die while you just watch. Then the fourth & final team, drawn to the sound of gunshots earlier, shoot both of your teammates in the head from a bush before either realize what's happening. You yell one last cowboy-expletive over proxy-chat as you die shooting into the underbrush.

Suddenly, you recall hearing footsteps at that same bush back when you were placing your trap in the water, having dismissed it as coming from your nearby teammate.

The combat feels fantastic, and the way the enemies work together is wonderful! ...but, it isn't a perfect game by any means. While the core gameplay loop is polished to a mirror shine, with only 3 biomes. and only a handful of enemies, it definitely starts to feel light on content early in. But here's the thing, because of how the enemies work together, adding more enemies would give a much greater feeling of variety per content added than if this were a different game. I'm betting adding more content is a lot harder than it sounds, however, considering how tightly designed and balanced all the items and enemies are. This issue is echoed in many other aspects too; I feel like there needs to be a few more variations on rooms, and a few more types of traps, a few more props to decorate the levels, etc. But again, because of the tight design of the game, a few more traps, or room variants, etc. would give a lot more gameplay variety than it would were this a different game. So I'm torn -I love this game, and I love everything in it, but I can't help but feel there isn't enough in it. I'm going to rate this up, and even say it's well worth the price at 15% off, but I really hope they add content updates in the future, because if they added more (items, enemies, biomes) I feel like this could be on par with the heavy hitters of the genre like Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, and Risk of Rain. Please devs, keep adding to this title.

Additional notes:
<>The game definitely feels best on K+M
<>Turning Controller vibration off does not work
<>There are at least 3 characters to play as, and each feels great and unique
<>Shields are pixel accurate, and exposed areas can still be shot
<>The AI behaviors are important to pay attention to (Boars won't attack unless provoked, for example)