Xen: The Hunt

Baf's Guide

The second episode of the Xen series, The Hunt, manages to overcome the worst problems of its predecessor, Xen: The Contest. It's much more polished (although there are still several minor implementation glitches there), and avoids most of the unlucky design decisions of the previous part.

This time, we meet John Richardson as he is in mortal danger: someone (Aetonians? Ratals?) pursuits him, trying to kill him. As usual, the police is behind him, too (just like in the previous episode). The story is pretty railroaded (although personally, I have no problems with that), and separated into several "chapters". While it's very well possible to render the game unwinnable, the player gets a warning (s)he should save beforehand, and "fatal mistakes" only affect the current chapter (IOW, one doesn't need to refer to previous chapters once (s)he completed them).

The game is definitely worth playing for the sake of the strong plot, and nice characters; as to puzzles, they clearly weren't the main focus during development.

-- Valentine Kopteltsev