Throughout my teenage years, I had two hangout games. We’ll get to the earlier of the two in just a second, but the latter of the pair was theHunter: Call Of The Wild.
COTW is a hunting simulator. I would describe it as being as accurate as a hunting simulator can be while still being fun to interact with. As a little personal history, my dad is a redneck. He has always wanted me to hunt with him, and I have at points. It’s been in the range of a decade since I last hunted with him, and I honestly care too much about animals to really care to go again, but I love the quiet contemplation in nature that hunting provides. There is a unique zen that happens when you plan out a spot for weeks, put on your finest camouflage, grab a weapon, and sit in a single spot for hours, hoping to get food for your family, assuming you don’t just end up enjoying the company of friends and chatting for a few hours, thus scaring away all the deer. That contemplative companionship is what I love about hunting, not hurting animals. theHunter provides that.
There’s a certain concoction of elements that makes theHunter so special: Despite approaching a decade of age, the game is still stunningly gorgeous, the accuracy of experience and detail of environment and animal behavior allows for that contemplation, but, here’s the secret, it’s still a video game and it still breaks sometimes and those breaks lead to some of the finest comedy you can encounter in a game.
theHunter is a game where you can hunt for hours and never see a single deer, but then for some reason the AI pathing breaks and an entire herd dprints directly at you and your buddy and its suddenly Big Buck Hunter and you’re both scrambling firing black powder rifles as fast as you possibly can because you’re being gifted the most insane score increasing moment in gaming history.