Hannah

Concept: Video game that presents as a realistic and detailed open-world hunting simulator, in the vein of theHunter: Call of the Wild. There's a complex bullet trajectory and penetration system, there's tracking animals, there's very difficult stealth around skittish animals...

But the game economy is tuned to encourage you to go out to hunt deer at night. And when you do, it soon becomes apparent that there's more in those woods than just deer. That perhaps something out there is hunting you.

my friends and I have been saying it since getting into Classic years ago. A frequently repeated sentiment during our play sessions was, "wouldn't it be wild if there was just like... a sasquatch or something that could randomly appear?" just a random cryptid to give you a little spook. But even more often, we used to wish for theHunter, but with dinosaurs.

... until they made it. theHunter: Primal could have been an incredible game. All they really needed to do was take theHunter, and swap the deer and bears and such out for dinos. We would have paid anything for that experience. But for some reason they didn't do that. Primal was this weird, half-baked survival/battle-royale game with awful balance and practically nothing going on. There were dinosaurs, sure. But the game built around them was boring and busted. It was truly baffling why they went that route. We were so close to having our dream game.

Anyway, this post reminded me of that. Because the predatory dinosaurs did indeed hunt the players, and it was very spooky to be laying in the grass and watch a t-rex wander past, clearly searching for you. Just a shame about the rest of the game.