Being a writer, I find myself often attracted to mythologies from our collective past. Everything from the Wendigos of North America, to the Gods of Ancient Greece, to the Oni of Japan, there are so many phenomenal stories that we can trace our growth from. When I first saw the title of Folklore Hunter and saw that the game offers the opportunity to hunt some of these legendary creatures of old, I leaped at the chance to review it. While none of the marketing or outside look of it seemed familiar to me, I did feel a strange sense of familiarity with the game.

That is when I realized that Folklore Hunter has been in early access on Steam since February of 2020, literally a month or two before the COVID-19 pandemic swept across North America. Due to that, there is a good chance that I watched one of my favorite YouTubers play this game a few years ago. The question now stood in front of me: how has this game evolved over the last six years? To answer, I grabbed three of my friends, and we decided to go hunting!

To start, this is a game that has the potential to be extremely fun! There were plenty of hilarious moments that my friends and I got into while playing this game. I wouldn’t mark it as a friendslop title like Peak, since it is not entirely dependent on you completing these hunts with friends. You could go waltzing into the woods by yourself and take out these legendary creatures, but that is kind of boring. It was a very good thing that I was able to bring friends along because this game has an absolutely bonkers learning curve, which is not something that any of us expected.

This is because Folklore Hunter gives almost no instructions as to how you are supposed to deal with the monsters or how any of their mechanics work. My friends and I spent about half of our initial ammunition shooting the Wendigo on our first hunt, only to realize about thirty minutes in that we weren’t damaging it at all. My friend put it best when he told me, “If we are supposed to be folklore hunters shouldn’t we have some sort of guide about the folklore that we are hunting similar to how Phasmophobia has a book of spirits for the players to decide what ghost they are dealing with?” and I couldn’t agree with him more. 

Folklore Hunter does have quite a few unique things going for it, some good and some bad. For example, the maps in this game tend to be quite large, which definitely gives players the ability to explore and come up with their own strategies for how to deal with the various creatures. On the other hand, the maps tend to be a bit janky and incomplete. When we were hunting the Strigols in Bloodfang Forest, my one friend eventually discovered that there was a large chunk of the map that you could go to that wasn’t on the map in your toolbar.

It was luckily easy for me to find him as he appeared on my map compass that was always displayed, but he and I both fell off the normal map and came into this large wooded area that seemed to have absolutely nothing. Was this supposed to have a secret that the developers left behind, or was it just a part of the map that was literally left behind? While we don’t have the answers to that, we did have a wonderful standoff with a horde of weaker Strigols that were trying to bite our heads off. 

There are a few aspects of the game mechanics that are still a bit janky that need to be polished. The most glaring one is the behavior of the monsters from time to time, specifically that of the Wendigo. I am not sure if something happened with the amount of initial hunting that we were doing of the creature, but throughout our time, the Wendigo kept returning to this one area on the top part of the map.

This led to us putting a camera and a boatload of traps surrounding it. This caused quite a bit of early fun, but eventually it ended up feeling wrong, since we saw that it seemed to do nothing for a period of time before it would be reactivated. It wouldn’t move, trigger traps, or take a swipe at us when we came close. We could’ve broken it with our early interactions with it, but I don’t understand how unloading countless bullets into it would cause such a thing to happen.

Overall, this game definitely seems like it needs a little bit more time in the oven. There is not a whole lot to do, but there is a lot of potential that the game has. The difference between the Night of the Wendigo level and the Bloodfang Forest level seems to be almost night and day in terms of polish. I wonder if I would have the same opinion if we had played Bloodfang Forest first, because by that point, I had figured out the general gist of the game, but I will never know now. I hope that the developers continue to work on Folklore Hunter as there is still a lot of work before it can be as good as I believe it can be. If you are looking for similar games, consider checking out David Sanders review of The Spirit Lift right here.

A PC review copy of Folklore Hunter was provided by Liquid Donkey Games for this review.

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Folklore Hunter

17.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Quite a Bit of Potential
• Good Time with Friends

Cons

• Quite a Few Bugs
• Almost No Advice
• Incomplete Great Ideas