Game: The Hunter’s Journals – Pale Harbour
Platform: PC, Android
Genre: interactive fiction
Style: heavy influences
Verdict: Mixed
Buy: Steam | Google Play
Lovecraft Video Games received a copy of The Hunter’s Journals – Pale Harbour to review through the Steam Curator program.

The Hunter’s Journals – Pale Harbour is set up like a choose your own adventure book, complete with page numbers and a “bookmark” you use to save your progress.

It’s choice-driven interactive fiction where you play a hunter sent to investigate the strange events that have driven everyone away from the town of Pale Harbour. It quickly becomes apparent that you’re dealing with a twisted monstrosity that has infected a cult, and it’s up to you to deal with it.

Along the way, you’ll encounter other monsters and dangerous situations as well. Not every part feels Lovecraftian, but it’s certainly all horror.

A fairly detailed world is the backdrop for this story, and while you’ll pick up some details naturally as you play through, there are more detailed lore explanations unlocked as rewards for completing the game on each difficulty. Beating the game on a higher difficulty doesn’t also unlock the lower rewards, so you’ll need to finish on each difficulty if you want to read all the lore.

Now, the game isn’t entirely about reading and making choices. There’s actually a combat system that plays a major role.

At the start of the game, you’re assigned a set amount of stamina (health) and skill (attack power). During combat, you and your opponent will each roll dice, and your dice total is added to your skill. The one with the higher value wins the turn and deals two damage.

Due to the dice, there’s a fair amount of luck involved, but your skill value is what really determines whether you’ll find combat easy or hard.

You also can opt to skip through all the turns and just get the result. It felt to me like I was more likely to take damage when I skipped the turns instead of watching them play out, but that might have been coincidence.

Outside of combat, you’ll mainly be making choices about your adventure – whether to confront an enemy or hide, which path to take, what areas to search, etc. Some decisions lead straight to death, but others branch into smaller adventures along the way or give you different tools to use later on.

Unfortunately, since there’s an optimal path, it eventually stops feeling like you’re playing through a branching adventure and more like you’re learning the correct choices that will take you to the end. In one of my early playthroughs, I made it almost to the end only to realize I’d skipped exploring an area earlier and therefore had no path that didn’t lead to death. Another time, I explored an area but didn’t investigate all of it, only to be unable to proceed because the game simply told me I’d already explored that area when I tried to go back.

But aside from these concerns, The Hunter’s Journals – Pale Harbour provides an entertaining couple of hours of horror storytelling. If you want to play through a Lovecraftian adventure or have nostalgia for choose your own adventure books, it’s worth a look.

Buy: Steam | Google Play

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