Hunt: Showdown is a fantastic horror-survival shooter that pits you and your friends against other hunters all vying to be the ones to bag the monstrous bounty. Play it on a GeForce NOW Powered by Pentanet Priority membership to enjoy it at its best, with beautiful graphics, longer playtimes, and enough zombies to scare the spurs off a cowboy.
I am bad at Hunt: Showdown, but that’s okay. I get killed by a single headshot from a hunter three farms away in the middle of world-devouring firestorms. I get eaten by piles of writhing intestines the moment I stumble into a river. I rip myself to shreds on barbed wire trying to hunt down scavenger bird monsters with a penchant for WW1 trench warfare. My demonic bug drones go to waste, my explosive-tipped bullets go wide, and my serrated axe made from a lumber mill saw is always a little shorter than I think it is.
But that’s okay. Because everything I just described is cool as hell, and I feel lucky just to be a part of it.
A game that shouldn’t be real
Rootin', tootin', toil n' shootin'. Fire burn and cowboy bootin'
Hunt: Showdown is too cool to exist. Hunt: Showdown is the game we all thought as kids would be amazing but would never get made. Except it did.
In Hunt: Showdown, you and one or two buddies march out into the bayous of the south to hunt monsters. Finding clues these monsters leave behind tightens your search more and more as you move through the hellish swamps inhabited by monsters and zombies of a lesser breed to your quarry. Finding them, you descend into their lair to face them head-on, collect your bounty (should you survive) and escape to the edge of the map with your spoils in tow.
To take on the horrific, Eldritch monstrosities that represent your paycheck, you arm yourselves with classic cowboy firearms that take four score and seven years to reload and have a bang loud enough to wake the dead if they weren’t already up and about in teeming hungry hordes.
Are you starting to see what I mean about a game that’s just too cool to be real?
But you aren’t the only hunters out there. When you enter a hunt, you’re one of twelve potential players, split amongst teams of one, two, or three cowboys and cowgirls. Twelve hunters, a huge swamp, and one (sometimes two) bounties to hunt. Do you see where this ends?
That’s right. This swamp ain’t big enough for the twelve of us.
Becoming the Hunted
Eye of newt and spicy beans. Toe of frog and denim jeans.
Firing your gun, as I quickly discovered, is a fantastic way to have eleven more pointing straight in your direction. The monstrosities of the bayou are horrifying, to be sure, but in Hunt: Showdown, there is nothing more lethal to your cowboy’s survival than other hunters eager to trim down the competition. This is why, as I’ve learned the hard way, most hunters reserve their firearms for dealing with other players, and expertly apply the business end of axes, daggers, and cavalry sabres to any monsters they may encounter, far more subtle I’m sure you’ll agree.
But subtlety can only carry you so far. Once a monster has been defeated, all hunters on the map can see great lightning strikes leading them to the site of purification, which the victorious monster slayers must hold for several minutes to receive their bounty tokens before they can hightail it to the getaway cart. Even after this tense holdout, once the bounty tokens have been collected, the lightning storm follows the lucky hunters, clueing all around into their general location. So, anytime you collect a bounty, the real target is the one square in the middle of your forehead.
But with all that stress, there’s nothing more satisfying in this world or the next than pulling off a clean getaway. Finding the monster, defeating it, and escaping under a hail of jealous hunters’ gunfire? It’s divine, because it’s pulling on that special sort of joy we all have for a well-executed heist.
A Horrific Heist
With the tannin' of our hides. Somethin' wicked, this way rides
Think about it! Hunt: Showdown is a supernatural heist. You break in, find the treasure, break into the vault (The monster, bear with me), collect the cash, and have to make your getaway before anyone’s the wiser. Sometimes you even have it swiped straight out from under you at the last moment. While playing solo, I waited in a barn by a monster’s den until the purification was 95% complete. Throwing a decoy clean over the building that let off a fusillade of blanks, I ran inside as the bounties dropped and escaped with one in hand with the monster slayers none the wiser. I felt like a god.
Hunting monsters in the bayou as a supernatural cowboy witch is a dream come true, but the feeling of outgunning, outrunning and outcunning the other cowboys? Well, that’s the stuff dreams are made of.
Ready to start the hunt? You’ll see me out there in Hunt: Showdown, playing on GeForce NOW Powered by Pentanet. You just better hope I don’t see you first…
The opinions expressed here are those of Pentanet team member “Motley” and do not represent Pentanet or NVIDIA. Poem courtesy of Omnybus on Tumblr.
