Game: The Hunter’s Journals – Red Ripper
Platform: PC, Android
Genre: interactive fiction
Style: light Lovecraftian influences
Verdict: Mixed
Buy: Steam
Lovecraft Video Games received a review copy of The Hunter’s Journals – Red Ripper through the Steam Curator program.
A new entry in the Hunter’s Journals series is on the way just in time for Halloween, this time taking you to a hostile land to hunt down a deadly killer known as the Red Ripper.
If you’ve never played an entry in the series before, they’re choice-driven interactive fiction games with a dice-based combat system. Whenever you enter combat, your dice roll is added to your skill stat to determine your score for that round. If your score is higher than your opponent’s, you deal damage to them, and vice versa.
Red Ripper introduces a new mechanic, the Heirloom system. This lets you pick one item that gives an additional bonus during combat or gameplay.
The focus here is very much on the hunt, and it turns out to be a deadly one indeed. While the tone isn’t wholly cosmic horror, it does start to veer more in that direction the deeper into the story you get, and there are some nice twists and turns to the story. However, the pacing is dragged down somewhat by an extended maze section partway through that becomes tedious to navigate even if you have the items that make it more manageable.
Yet the main reason why I would hesitate to recommend this one as much as the previous games is its difficulty. It’s supposed to be a challenging hunt, especially because you’re on your own, and it might be in part to balance the Heirloom system, but Red Ripper feels brutally hard compared to previous entries in the series. Even on the easiest difficulty setting, I found myself saving and reloading during certain parts to get through encounters with a minimal amount of damage so I could scrape through the sections ahead.
The writing and descriptions are excellent for the horror genre as always, and The Hunter’s Journals – Red Ripper is a great, macabre adventure to embark on this Halloween… but be aware that you might find yourself in a war of attrition as you fight to reach the end.
Buy: Steam