The Hunter's Journals - Pale Harbour Reviews

Disclaimer: This is not a technical critique. I'm a streamer and I will review based on whether I enjoyed games and how well my community responded to them. I hope there's value in that to some. This game isn't going to blow you away visually if you're used to 'flashy' games with 'action'. However, as someone who very much enjoyed the 'Choose Your Own Adventures' books in my youth, it was easy for me to see beyond the not-full screen. It's a book and as such would have looked odd if it filled the screen. It was easy to pick up what to do, and there were different difficulty levels to choose from. As someone who enjoys the 'journey' and to experience the stories rather than stress too much about having enough health to last the game, I elected for the easiest setting. In the old 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books, you could turn down the corners of critical pages and return to them if you made a bad choice - this game has a single bookmark - it adds an extra layer of thought - you need to decide where to place it - a wrongly located save could commit you to a 'death loop' (which happened to me). Something that I can't let go unremarked, is the art in this game. It is gorgeous. The dev is an utter sadist (meant in the nicest possible way) and some of the twists and turns that the story takes are sickening, exciting and surprising. The art ties in so beautifully with the eerie and atmospheric nature and despite the sometimes gloomy settings, adds vibrancy. The voice-over is there for those who want to leave it to the professionals, or you can elect to turn it off should you wish to read it yourself (which is something I do for my streams.) You have options. I'd recommend that streamers have a game such as this for times when their PC is struggling - it's gentle on my computer and I imagine that even the most humble of setups can run it fine. All in all, I loved the game's simplicity, the atmosphere and the story. It was dark, a little spooky - I'd say quite Lovecraftian and a bit gory in places. A lot of thought has gone into it and I can't give you any spoilers, but decisions you make early on in the game can make or break, or drown you. I enjoyed playing this on stream and my community liked 'helping' (i.e. making choices that sent me to meet my maker. For the price you can't really go wrong. I challenge you to finish it - I failed. But I had a huge amount of fun (and will return to it to finish it off later.)

So, you really don't need to get too deep into Pale Harbour to run into this issue. Writing-wise, it's fine. It's decently evocative. You have a good sense of the setting and your stakes, and your character has some personality to the way they move and interact with the world. But let's talk about infesting your gamebook with instadeaths. This used to be a style, with some books going all in on having one golden route and a TON of random gameovers hidden behind, like, drinking the wrong flavor of wine. This style hung around for a little bit, but progressively fell out of favor. And designers were correct to ditch instadeaths in gamebooks, because it isn't interesting. The consequence for "go into the field" -> "you die" is that the book has wasted your time. If you took damage or lost skill or lost money or lost medical supplies or got walled out of a later event or *something* with lasting impact, you would feel it for more than a moment. But if it's just a random insta that you had to read the developer's mind to predict---and especially in an *investigative game* where you're supposed to investigate stuff---it makes the book obnoxious to read through. Go into the field. Insta. Sleep in the pantry. Insta. Try to move the cultist's body so you can burn it. Insta. To the book's credit, there are also a ton of random "this was a bad choice and there are consequences" choices early on. So like, you learn not to go into barns (reason?) or talk to villagers (this is legit terrible because it trains you not to do a thing that the game then wants you to do.) But these choices are peppered in amongst the instas, which are already a minefield of meaningless run resets. I'll play further and change my review if I end up feeling differently later. But like, don't do this lol. There's 50+ years of gamebook tech saying not to do this. Unless your market share is people who unironically liked Hell House, what are we doing here. Edit: Your choice is five minute of clicking to get back to where you were, or savescumming. If you click, you can take a different path. This usually isn't worth doing, since the different path just ends in instadeath, but you'll need to do it after buying the diving weights bricks your run for reasons no human could forsee. If you savescum, you have to save/load every minute or so, which actually feels worse than five minutes of rote clicking. All of this would suck way less if every choice wasn't "do you pass by the big rock or the small rock," and then the small rock kills you because it wasn't rock, it was a rock lobster. Rock lobster Rock lobster Rock lobster Rock lobster Motion in the ocean His air hose broke Lots of trouble Lots of bubble He was in a jam S'in a giant clam Rock rock Rock lobster Down, down Lobster rock Lobster rock Let's rock! Boy's in bikinis Girls in surfboards Everybody's rockin' Everybody's fruggin' Twistin' 'round the fire Havin' fun Bakin' potatoes Bakin' in the sun Put on your noseguard Put on the Lifeguard Pass the tanning butter Here comes a stingray There goes a manta-ray In walked a jelly fish There goes a dog-fish Chased by a cat-fish In flew a sea robin Watch out for that piranha There goes a narwhal Here comes a bikini whale! Rock lobster Rock lobster Rock lobster Rock lobster

Excellently written and narrated text based adventure. It's fairly difficult, so expect to die a lot. It's a very niche genre, text based choose your own adventure games, but as far as quality goes this one is at the top. The art is quality, and the voicing of the narrator is excellent.