The Virtual 100 – Game 8
The playthrough of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge on which this write-up is based was done completely on the SteamDeck OLED. I’ll touch on this at the end.
Oh man. These are the hardest games to talk about. The games that aren’t bad, but they’re not necessarily good either. They’re just… there.
Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is one such game. I actually liked the game, though as I sit here writing this script, I’m finding it difficult to explain why. Perhaps it’s my unexplainable penchant for playing mediocre games, or maybe I have some masochistic tendencies buried deep down in my subconscious that pushes me to waste time on old, barely memorable games when I have a digital mountain of backlog titles vying for my attention. Why I do this, I’ll never know.
Oh, and I started this game FIVE TIMES. The first attempt was pretty half-assed trial using Playstation Now, and I realized about two hours in that a streaming version of the PS3 port was probably the worst way to experience the game. So I bought the PC version and started my second playthrough. I got a few levels in when I realized that I had no idea what was going on because I was playing it on mute while also watching television. So I started a third playthrough with the intent to actually pay attention. I got one or two hours into it when I set it down and wandered off to play other things. By the time I came back several months later, I couldn’t remember where I was going or what I was doing. So I tried a fourth time, but I had my head up my ass and somehow had it set to the hardest difficulty setting. At first I thought it was my imagination, but man I could swear the game was taking me much longer to get through, and about two levels in I realized why. And while I’m not afraid of a little bit of challenge, I tend to be very picky about what games I grind and struggle my way through. This is not one of those games. So I restarted yet again— this time with no intention of abandoning it, nor spending a ton of time on it. I chose Easy mode, and thus my playthrough was kind of a cakewalk. And I am not ashamed of this.
It seems like nobody talks about Hunted: The Demon’s Forge anymore. Which, I get it; it’s not exactly the most exciting game out there.
But when you take a peek at who developed and published the game, it becomes a little bit more of a head-scratcher.
Released in 2011, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge was developed by inXile and published by Bethesda Softworks. Yes, that inXile and that Bethesda.
That’s quite the pedigree, yet it gets the red-headed stepchild treatment from both of those companies, having been completely ignored over the years by both parties. I didn’t even realize it was produced by them until I booted it up on the Playstation Now and saw the logos splash across the screen. I had to scrunch my nose at this.
InXile? The peeps who made Wasteland 2 and 3? And Torment: Tides of Numenara? And The Bard’s Tale? They made this? That’s… interesting. As I mentioned above, it was the PS3 version, and let’s be honest, the PS3 versions of most multiplats back then weren’t the best. The Xbox 360 version was never made backward compatible, and rather than bother trying to track it down, I settled for the PC version.
Which was probably the best decision. On a modern PC rig, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge runs extremely well. I don’t have a top of the line PC, but it’s no slouch either, and running it at 1080p/60 fps barely gets my fans blowin’. Although it does this weird thing where the UI gets confused and forgets whether I’m playing on mouse and keyboard or with a controller. Sometimes it will actually say to press Shift for one ability and the Y button for another. It’s wonky, but whatever, it still works.
I can’t help but wonder if Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is a game that would be made today. Not just because of the amount of skin that’s on display here, but because the game is extremely linear. And also, because of the amount of skin that’s on display here. This is very much a game from the 7th generation of consoles. It might have come out in 2011, but it has 2008 scribbled all over it.
This means a few things; first, it means the color palette is 50 Shades of Brown. Aside from a few areas that take place in some fantastical locales full of trees and waterfalls, the game is dark. The story is dark and the environments are dark. Like, really dark. Second, it means the game plays like Gears of War. And honestly that’s a good way to think about this game. If you like Gears, and you like skeletons and scantily-clad elves, then you might be into this game. Actually, that makes it sound kinda cool. I wouldn’t have minded a scantily clad elf fighting the Locust. But that’s getting off track.
The story of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is fairly straight-forward. There’s a duo of protagonists. I think they’re mercenaries? The dude keeps having dreams of a door and a woman with some fantastic cleavage. It turns out to all be a bit prophetic, as his dreams actually come to be, and they set off in search of Cleavage Lady to rescue her from these things called the Wargar, which are like orcs because duh.
Along the way they learn that a mega orc is making a smaller orcs drink a bunch of silver shit in order to make them better orcs. This is all being done for orc reasons and they’re attacking the human population because that’s what orcs apparently do. And the human population is not responding to the call in a very productive manner. They’re kinda getting their asses kicked.
It’s all very Dragon Age Origins. Or Bound by Flame. Or any other action RPG you can think of where demons are crazy strong and the humans are woefully inept.
Luckily, you aren’t playing as just any human. Yours is bald and has an axe, and he’s being accompanied by a hot elf chick in a loin cloth.
I just deleted about four big paragraphs talking about the combat mechanics. Because who cares. Both characters have a ranged attack and a melee attack. When you go into your ranged mode, the camera zooms into an over-the-shoulder third person shooter type view, and when you melee it pulls back and it’s a more traditional hack n slash. And that’s all you really need to know.
The weird thing is that you can’t swap between characters on the fly. You have to do it at special glowing things. It doesn’t really matter though if you just choose to play as the same character the whole way through, they both play pretty similar in my opinion.
One character might have to use their abilities to open a door or light a torch, but if you’re not playing as that character, a simple button prompt will command them to do what they need to do.
The game has a type of persistent character progression that’s kinda interesting but also kinda weird. Performing a certain number of actions— like getting 250 kills with the bow, will earn you an upgrade. These upgrades stack and as long as you’re playing under the same save file you can go back and replay any levels you’ve already completed, and the stats track.
Likewise, the gold your characters pick up fill up a meter, and there are certain goals to hit with the total amount of gold you collected. The weird thing about this was that the gold unlocks assets for use in a custom level creator, and that’s it. Did anyone ever use this? Once I realized that’s all the gold was used for, I completely stopped caring about it. I would have enjoyed it way more if the gold was used for unlocking cheats or buffs. Or alternative loin cloth bikinis for the elf. You know, important stuff.
The game is pretty linear, with levels playing out as chapters. Each area has a few little secrets tucked away and a puzzle or two, usually consisting of collecting a specific item and returning it somewhere, or shooting a torch with an orange or blue flame, but none if it is all that complicated and you’ll spend most of your time just trying to figure out what you missed that’s keeping you from moving forward.
Okay, enough about the setup of the game. Now to talk about my experience with it, and what I thought of the game, because I’ll be honest— I was hot and cold on it a few times. It started off pretty strong, but about halfway through it started to get a bit repetitive. The wargar are the main enemy, and while the game starts to sprinkle new enemies into the mix, they never fully replace them. It’s like listening to the 12 Days of Christmas.
On the fifth stage of Hunted, InXile gave to me: 5 floating eyeballs, 4 charging cow-men, 3 scrambling spiders, 2 skeletons… and a wargar with a crossbow.
I kid, but it’s true. By the later stages, the game is throwing all of these at you at once, and man it really starts to get irritating. I played as Elara most of the game, and her bow is far more powerful than her sword— she is the ranged fighter after all. So I was in the over-the-shoulder shooter view, and getting swarmed and hit by enemies from all sides in this view was quite frustrating. I was pretty damn tired of the Wargar by the time the endgame came around.
The game has several moments where you are given a choice. A battle is about to take place. A quite lot, quite annoying battle, where the game will throw waves of enemies at you. This is by design. The mcguffin in Hunted is this silver sludge called Sleg. This stuff is basically like Spinach for Popeye. Drinking it will let you go Super Saiyan and wreck shit on the battlefield. However, drinking this will essentially taint you and make you slave to the stuff.
I knew this going in. I had poked through a walkthrough online, and was privvy to the fact that drinking the sleg will get you the bad ending, even if you only use it once. So I was aware of this. The thing that pissed me off was that the first time I came across one of these arenas, I was unaware of what was about to happen, and I approached a thing on a pedestal that had a ‘B button’ prompt on it— much like every other puzzle/item/action in the game. So I pressed B.
The next thing I know, Elara is chugging this shit like she’s at a frat party, and I’m practically tossing my controller because I knew I just fucked my ending. There was no way I was about to reload my last checkpoint and/or play through that chapter again. So I continued on, and I dredged through the irritating-by-design future battles, still ignoring the sleg (which at least I could recognize by then) and I was still treated to the bad ending. There’s no sliding scale. There’s no redeeming yourself. One sip, you’re fucked.
Maybe if this was 2007, I’d play through again to get the better ending. And who knows, maybe one day I will. But I got shit to do these days, and wrapping this up meant putting another game on the grid and getting it out of my backlog. In that regard, it was mission accomplished.
How does it play on the Steam Deck OLED?
As I mentioned above, when I re-started this game for the hundredth time, I decided to do the entire playthrough on my shiny new Steam Deck OLED. This was because it was a new toy and I could take it with me in the work van and tinker with it before work and if I had any downtime, and it was great, when I had a chance to play it. And while I did wrap the game up on my PC over the weekend, the majority of the game was played with the handheld.
This game performs brilliantly on the SD OLED. It looks great, the frame rate is rock solid, and the controls perform well— to an extent. There is an issue with the controls, and I mentioned it at the beginning, where the game literally gets confused if you’re playing with a controller or a mouse and keyboard, and will continually flip-flop between showing you a button prompt, like pressing the ‘B’ button, or a keyboard prompt, like ‘E’ or ‘Spacebar.’
Thankfully this never actually affects the controls themselves. Whether it says one thing or the other, the controller still works. So after a while I just started to ignore it. The game was designed with controller support in mind, so no re-mapping of keyboard controls was necessary.
Something that did get annoying, and I thought it was a Steam Deck issue, was that, while playing as Elara at least, pressing the left trigger to block with her shield and then clicking over to her bow will cause her bow to freeze up. She won’t be able to use her magic ability or sometimes even shoot. You have to tap the X button to go back to her sword, in which she’ll resume blocking. Then you have to tap the left trigger again to get her to stop blocking, then switch over to your bow. Once I figured out what was going on, I was able to avoid it, and I even checked on the PC to see if it was a game thing or a Deck thing, and it carried over.
So it’s not an issue with the Steam Deck. The thing runs like a dream, and it doesn’t push the device hard enough to really impact the battery life much.
Steam Deck OLED Experience: A
That’s all I got for this one, which admittedly, is a lot more than I thought it would be. But hey, it is what it is. Game number 8 is in the books.
