Folklore Hunter Review: Disappointing Cryptid Hunt with Poor Design and Technical Issues

Folklore Hunter is a first-person shooter where the player is called to investigate clues in the environment to solve a mysterious massacre. Each of these investigations culminate in a showdown with a menacing cryptid. To my dismay, Folklore Hunter is more of a mystery to me than the cryptids it portrays. The combat is trivial, yet the game is insultingly hard to finish. Without ongoing exposition, this FPS is uninterested in guiding the player and is likely to be impenetrable for most players.

My first impressions of the game were negative because of the shoddy menu buttons and incorrect settings. Fullscreen should have been default, but after fixing that I found that all of the buttons on the main menu were out of place. To press the desired button would require the mouse to be clicking much lower. These are very slight offenses, but I also noted the drastic increase in fan RPM. I should have taken this as a sign of what was to come. My machine was huffing and puffing to run the game; the game was likewise as laborious to play. Getting into the game exposed further problems. I’m using an Xbox controller, and something I found annoying was the incorrect face buttons being displayed. ‘Press X’ was actually referring to ‘Y,’ and regardless of input the symbol changes to ‘E’ on the keyboard. I know game development is complicated and not easy, but these technical errors really hurt the quality of the product.

Folklore Hunter is pretty basic and shallow. Generally speaking, the bigger and more complicated games are most likely to include bugs and technical glitches. These issues can sometimes be excused and overlooked depending on the scope of the game, but that is not the case with Folklore Hunter. This game only consists of three open-world areas. Each area is a decent size but also a total ghost town. The player is always arriving after a massacre has transpired, and the only living NPCs in the game are disappointing. The only creatures you will encounter besides the cryptids are wolves, which seem to come in packs of four and are only a challenge in foliage. A wolf pack is a laughably easy fight, especially if the player shoots from afar; two shots each and they are down. These wolves are often obscured by pieces of the scenery that are flat and undetailed. Despite what my fan RPM was telling me, the environments in this game look like they could have been from the Xbox 360/PS3 era. Not only do the wolves and cryptids look flat and rigid; the ground, buildings, and bushes all look terrible. They often look like the textures have failed to load, and any trees in the distance become basic twig models. The game is meant to take place mostly at night, but that darkness only adds to the weak graphics.

My favourite part of the game is the tone established and the setup of each hunt. As a hunter of the occult, it is your duty to investigate sightings of the uncanny, trace the evidence back to a supernatural creature, and destroy it. There are three hunts to play, and each one begins with a series of lines of simple dialog. The text delivers the bare minimum exposition to prime the player for the situation at hand. There are occasional good attempts at environmental storytelling, but unfortunately the exposition - or any real narrative - stops there.

The lack of narrative is ultimately what kills the experience. Any mystery that was present is immediately undone by design. The cryptid is either a werewolf, a vampire-thing, or Mothman, and in all cases it plays out the same: 

Arrive on location. 

Everyone is dead. 

Follow ‘clues’ to find the monster. 

Kill it. 

Fair enough, but the trouble is finding out how to kill the creature. This game is unfairly hard. I don’t want objective markers or waypoints in the game, but some form of a hint system would have been great. Using the first hunt as an example: The player must locate three runic symbols and use them to create a dozen runes to perform a ritual. Great, but when was the game going to tell me this? Stumbling around in the dark, I was able to figure this much out on my own, but one of the symbols eluded me. My only hint as to a third symbol location was that my inventory showed that I had acquired Rune #2 and #3. Just like that old frat prank, I was on a wild goose chase for something nearly impossible to find in the dark and blocky environments. 

I thought to myself that this could be my fault. Maybe I wasn’t understanding this game - maybe I just don’t get it - but a quick look at Folklore Hunter on Steam will exonerate me. One of the most popular posts on the Community page is a step-by-step guide to the first hunt. Looking at the achievements reveals that less than 10% of players have completed a single hunt.

In conclusion: Finding a meaningful experience in Folklore Hunter is just as likely as finding Mothman in real life. The game disrespects the player’s time and does not look good while doing so. Almost all of the design choices are an attempt to wring as much as possible out of three bland missions, and most players didn’t stick around. The game is clearly not a competent product when the game community has to rally together. Someone created a step-by-step guide, and even then a tiny percentage of players were interested. Truly bleak.