Cryptid Hunter

One of the blessings of middle age is that I’ve arrived at a stage of life where I’m neither especially good at video games, nor especially bothered by not being especially good at video games. I can bumble my way through an immersive sim with plenty of save-scumming, have an adequate enough understanding of roguelike strategy that I can usually eke out a lowest-difficulty win eventually, and have the wisdom to give anything that advertises itself as a Soulslike a wide berth (no, wider). But IF is a relatively sedate pasture, where fading reflexes and blurred vision don’t exact much of a toll, and by this point I’ve played more than enough of it to have a solid feeling for the common tricks and tropes, so it’s usually not too much of a challenge to get to a good ending (especially since some of the wisdom time brings is a lack of compunction about consulting the walkthrough).

Nonetheless, I’m forced to confess to y’all that I absolutely suck at Cryptid Hunter.

It doesn’t seem like it should be that fiendish of an experience – in fact, its first impression is almost cozy, drawing you into a heartwarming story where an aspirational hunter after obscure creatures is gifted the tools they need to make their avocation their vocation (well, actually that’s the second impression; my first impression was chagrin that the very first word of the blurb is a typo’d “your” in place of a “you’re”, which thankfully isn’t reflective of the mostly-solid editing in the game proper, but is still worth correcting). Your mysterious benefactor also gives you a list of three specific cryptids they’d like you to nab, each characterized by a trio of vague traits like “near water” or “elongated.” After a quick trip to the library to read up on the spooooky background of the town’s six creepy locations, and a glance over the thoughtfully provided notebook where you can scribble observations and guidebook that memorializes your quarries, it’s off to the field.

Investigations follow a consistent pattern: after a few introductory passages where you explore the chosen location, you come across evidence of a cryptid or the thing itself, at which point you have a few choices, which always includes taking general observations, snapping a photo, capturing it, or leaving it alone, at least for now (sometimes there are additional bespoke interactions, too). Usually a casual perusal will establish one of the creature’s traits with clarity, but often there’s a fair bit of ambiguity, so you need to think carefully about what the game is presenting to you. You’ll also need to pay close attention to the photos, which are rendered in-game, not just described in the text, and are impressively surreal and creepy.

Indeed, the cryptids are a real highlight; we’re not just talking about Bigfoot here, these are unique beasties I don’t recall coming across before. And while the prose is a bit too informal to be really scary, it nonetheless lifts up well-chosen details to set the mood:

"Actually determining the lake from its banks is harder than you thought. The lake is filmed over with dense, slimy algae matching the muddied moss that you’ve been schlepping through. Pieces of trash float around the sides of the dock."

So all the elements are in place for a satisfying deduction game, the more so because the creatures you’re searching for are randomized each time you play. After you capture your third cryptid, an endgame sequence triggers that sees you bring your prey to your employer, unlocking a climactic encounter if you’ve gotten them all correct. Sadly, as I mentioned, it turns out I was quite bad at this! I felt confident enough in deciding whether a particular beast let out a scream or had a smell, but some of the traits are far more obscure – does a monster that goes on all fours but sometimes rears up have “two ways of moving”? If water is rippling in all directions around a sea creature, is that an indication that it’s got “elemental manipulation” or is it just thrashing around?

I’m sure smarter, more observant people than me would play carefully, take careful notes, rule certain monsters in and out, and only begin capturing once they were sure they had the solution. I, on the other hand, preferred to squint uncomprehendingly at the guidebook, shrug and make a gut decision, and trust random chance to deliver me to the true ending.

This, as it turned out, was an amazingly effective strategy at getting me two out of three of the right monsters, which I managed to do six times running before the gods of the random number generator finally took pity on me. And while the climax was worth it – it has a fun twist and some choice-based gameplay that feels like it allows for some satisfying variation in endings – playing Cryptid Hunter that many times unfortunately did take some of the bloom off of it. The location descriptions, the monsters, and the places where you find them are exactly the same in each playthrough – it’s only the list of targets that changes – meaning that almost all of the text is exactly the same every time; if you didn’t quite grok a creature’s traits last time, well, good luck, you’ll be reading through the same fuzzy description next time. The game also presents itself in a lot of shorter passages, meaning that even if you know exactly where to find a monster you want to capture, you need to do a lot of brainless clicking to get to that point.

As a result, I’m not sure Cryptid Hunter is as replayable as its blurb claims, but it’s very much a good time over the first playthrough or two. So if I didn’t have quite as fun of a time with it as I would have liked, well, I guess that’s just down to my failure to Git Gud.