Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters
Verdict
I played as a male Hunter with a strength/physical-focused build. I pursued Wil’s romance, though it didn’t go anywhere. Unfortunately, I came away with very few positive things to say about the game.
I’ve never played any game of the Hunter TTRPG, nor any game from World of Darkness in general, so I didn’t know what to expect from A Time of Monsters. I’ve never played any of Paul Wang’s other games either. However, the opening quote from Gramsci is the first sign of the tiresome, heavy-handed militancy pervasive throughout the whole work. This game leans hard and unapologetically to one side of the political landscape, with no nuance and no respite. The constant complaining from every character about every social issue possible is wearisome and takes away from the enjoyment of what would otherwise, quite honestly, be just an OK story. Even if I might agree with them in principle, I just couldn’t stand the characters. There were few elements to balance the annoyance, and if I hadn’t already decided to complete all the games in my library, I would very likely have DNF’d it.
Fuck the police! Yeah, the police fuck up a lot, but they also do a lot of good. I understand that these characters would have found themselves on the bad side of law and order more often than not, but there’s no nuance, and lacking nuance, there’s no stop to the constant complaining. My problem isn’t that the game addresses social issues or has a political message, but that too often it seemed to communicate a position rather than open a conversation. I was never given an opportunity to challenge or engage with those positions; all I could do — all I was allowed to do! — was sit quietly and listen. Look, Rent-a-Vice is one of my favourite CoG games, and it is as cyberpunk as cyberpunk can be. It’s about capitalism turning human lives into literal commodities, but I never felt as put off as I did here.
Writing
- Premise: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ (basic)
- Development: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ (no noteworthy character arc or plotline)
- Prose Style: ★★★★★★★★★☆ (really good)
- Theme Execution: ☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ (distasteful and annoying)
The premise is simple: you are a homeless person. You survive a vampire attack, become its target, and then join some squatters who do vampire hunting on the side for charity. Eventually, you go from the defensive to the offensive.
Maybe it has to do with the setting of the Hunter/WoD games, or maybe I glossed over the explanation, but I didn’t get why the vampire started targeting me. Was it wounded pride that a mark got away? Was it to protect vampire secrecy? But there are a lot of other people who know about the vampires, and, not to give away spoilers, the vampire targeting me didn’t seem particularly interested in upholding the vampire community; so why did I specifically become a target? It seemed silly that the vampire and his friends would keep coming after me when I was a nobody. I kept waiting to find out I had something special in me, maybe a special bloodline that made me highly effective as a vampire hunter, or something! But nope; it was just stubbornness on their part. I was really a nobody all along.
Also, for a game about vampire hunters, I was expecting to fight them with a bit more than just a flashlight and the power of friendship. In the endgame, they don’t even have a proper plan. They literally just go after the vampire clique and hope for the best. They are not very good hunters. I get that they’re supposed to be amateurs, but c’mon!, all you need is a bit of common sense. Even the way the climax resolves, with the fight going on for so long that the vampires are caught by surprise by the morning sun, would have been more palatable if they had actually, deliberately, planned for it. The way it happened, it was just a deus ex machina, saved by Lady Luck. Maybe, in a different branch, the story makes more sense, but certainly not in the one I played.
Wil mentions FIRSTLIGHT, but never properly explains what they are or why we shouldn’t reach out to them for help. This came up very late in the game, and I did spend a lot of time with Wil. It feels like, if it was that important, he should have mentioned it earlier, no? The way it happened felt contrived, like the author ran out of ideas for options to include. I managed to guarantee the support of the Taishanhui, but they didn’t even get mentioned during the climactic battle. (Where were they? They smoked faster than the damn vampires.) And despite giving you the option to side with Lydia, it’s an option just for formality’s sake. The game makes it very clear that it’s a bad option. So it’s not really an option, is it? I actually don’t understand why. Siding with the “civilised” vampires against the bloodthirsty, unscrupulous ones seems like a reasonable stance to take. But the game makes you feel bad for even considering that.
The game mentions I’m young, but how young? Initially, I imagined my PC in a similar age bracket to my own, which is early 30s. So, every time my character said something like “the vibes are off” or “let him cook”, it was a real effort not to roll my eyes. For me, that sort of language is associated with Reddit memes and TikTok; I wish my character didn’t talk like a teenager, or at least that the game made it clear from the start that I was playing as one.
I have to say, the prose is good. Wang clearly knows how to write, how to set a scene, how to weave a conversation… Unfortunately, it’s good wrapping around a bad product. Furthermore, there were a few instances of writing issues: missing quotation marks around dialogue, making it confusing to read; references to events that did not happen (I didn’t run when Lydia found us in the tunnels, but in Act 4 there’s a reference to Lydia chasing after us); messed-up pronouns; and continuity issues (a character’s reply had nothing to do with what was said before).
And as I said, the constant barrage of woe is me!, fuck the police!, speak truth to power!, they’re killing us!, society doesn’t care about the poor!, check your privilege!, down with capital!, yada yada yada, exponentially made the game less enjoyable. And I tried to like it, I really did. I have bought the entire Infinity series already, and it’s so hyped that I was looking forward to it. Now, not so much.
Cast
- Cast: ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ (miserable to spend time with)
Every character is constantly miserable. If you try to cheer them up, you’ll just end up depressed. I tried to help Wil, but it’s almost like he’s addicted to his own misery (more than to his liquor). Zheng is the most agreeable of the crew. Despite taking every opportunity to improve my relationship with both Wil and Zheng, I still had locked options by the endgame because we didn’t have a good enough relationship.
I spent a whole day that I could have spent preparing to stay with Wil and help him through alcohol withdrawal. In fact, I always prioritised spending time with him. I spent my precious little money to buy him pizza. I picked every dialogue option that would improve our relationship. I turned down the option to call FIRSTLIGHT just because he was distraught by the idea. I suffered through his endless self-deprecating, wallowing, defeatist remarks, but in the end, we didn’t have a good enough relationship for me to be able to help him. At some point, I picked an option that warned it would start a romance route, but there were no more romance or flirting options after that. I don’t know if I screwed up somewhere or if that was really the full extent of romance in this game. Maybe it was for the best, since I felt like I was playing as a teenager and he was a grown-ass man.
Same with Zheng: as much as I tried, in the end, I couldn’t help him with his son. Zheng was the most likeable character. I genuinely wanted to help him. I even took his Creed, even though I was going for a physical build.
I also wanted to spend more time with Jengles. But at some point, he just drops out of the narrative. We hear he’s sick, but there was no chance to visit him or help him, and at the end of the game we learn that he died. Maybe there is an alternative branch where we can pursue that plotline, but in my playthrough it felt like a very random development.
Because of Kate’s review, I didn’t even spend much time with Mandy, and Fleur-de-Lys just didn’t catch my attention enough.
I could empathise with the characters, but the game makes it hard to sympathise with any of them.
Mechanics
In general, I do like the text descriptions for stats instead of graph bars. But as I mentioned, I was surprised I didn’t have enough rapport with Wil or Zheng. So, just like I had the option to toggle between text and bullet points for my skills, I wanted the same for the relationships. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by other games, but I like the immediate feedback that a choice is having an effect, and the easiest way to do that is by seeing the numbers go up. I also tried to hoodwink Lydia by flirting with and flattering her, but I had no idea if it was working. Her text description didn’t change at all.
(I suspect a lot of this is due to how fairmath works. I’m a staunch opponent of fairmath. No other game system uses fairmath. It’s not a concept widely recognised in game design. And I don’t mean just pen-and-paper games, but even video games where the computer can do all the arithmetic. Have you ever wondered why? It was an interesting concept, whoever came up with it, but it just doesn’t work in practice and actually makes the game harder to balance! For high stats, an increase of even 15% might not functionally produce any effect, whereas a push in the opposite direction can set you back by a lot. It’s not fair at all! It is not a player’s skill issue; fairmath is intrinsically unbalanced. You have to take into account different stats at different points in the game, and should one direction be easier than the other? At which point, it makes more sense to just use flat values. I believe we’re living in a spiral of silence. Every author uses fairmath because every other author uses it too. I greatly wish authors would break with this convention and move past fairmath altogether.)
The shining jewel of this game is the hub system (interludes). The only other game with a hub implementation this good is The Golden Rose. (Although, if you ask me another day, I might give you a different answer. I don’t have a good memory.) Hubs are the equivalent of an open-world design for text-based games. Intimately related to that, you have the action economy. In parser-based IF, part of the fun is figuring out what you can do. Can I pick up that crowbar mentioned in the first paragraph? Then you type a command and surprise! The author did consider that you might want to pick up the crowbar and accounted for that. In choice-based IF, all options are laid bare before you at once. You just have to pick the one that suits you best. It’s interactive, sure, but not very game-y. When you add an action economy, you add a layer of strategy. Now I have to pick three or four out of a dozen options before the story moves on. For that to work, all options have to be equally attractive; otherwise, they become just padding. At every hub, I genuinely had to stop and consider my priorities and make real choices about what to pursue and what to give up. Anyone who has tried to write a few different, equally interesting options for the same choice knows how hard that can be, and Wang delivers on it consistently.
The game’s page listing says it has 1 million words. I believe a lot of those words are in branches I didn’t explore. On that alone, I’d say the game has high variance and replayability potential.
My Takeaways
You can (and should) include a message, but don’t beat the reader over the head with it, and most importantly, don’t annoy the reader. No one likes to be preached at.
Hubs + Action Economy is a golden template to elevate the game side of a gamebook. It creates strategic opportunity cost in choice-based IF.
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- but I do think it’s a good review), but this point jumped out at me because I agree with it so vehemently.