The Bounty Huntress is an indie answer to, ‘What if Dark Souls, but Metroidvania?’.
It’s a 2D combat-focused platformer where Rhea, the titular Bounty Huntress, must traverse a dangerous castle to investigate what happened to some kidnapped villagers. Unfortunately, it takes many of the interesting aspects of both Soulsborne and Metroid games and unifies them in a bland and occasionally downright sloppy way. In a sentence – it feels like an unfinished prototype.
Much of this game has been lifted straight from Soulsborne titles. This includes the UI and menus (though with more inconsistent fonts and general lack of polish), the combat style (each enemy type is effectively a mini rhythm boss), and the collection of a currency called ‘souls’ (a direct copy: die and you drop them – die again and you lose the one you dropped). There’s a real lack of original mechanics, or original ideas in general, to give it a unique feel or flavour. Fight enemies, explore, collect gear, unlock doors, defeat bosses, and little else. The simplicity of it might be forgiving if the world or story progression was interesting, but that’s quite frankly as bland as the rest of it. It’s just another dark-fantasy castle.
The controls are as fiddly and unforgiving as you might expect, given the obvious point of inspiration. I found them a challenge to use. The whole game is unforgiving, with limited save points and heals, and a non-linear map that’s tricky to navigate given that you never get a map. I spent quite a lot of the fairly short playtime getting lost and going round in circles, trying to work out what I was supposed to do next and where I was supposed to go. This feeling of challenge is clearly intended, but too often it tips into frustration, with little in the way of fulfilling reward on the other end.
I know full well that the writing and narrative are not the point of these kinds of games – it’s more about the player’s own adventure than any established narrative – but the text in The Bounty Huntress is worth highlighting as some of the worst I’ve ever seen in a published game. It doesn’t appear to have had even the most basic level of editing. I was prepared to forgive it as a sloppy first draft until I saw several instances of ‘u’ substituted in for ‘you’, and too many missing capitals and full stops to count. A primary school child could have written it more coherently. What’s present here is better off removed entirely. It would have made for a far more interesting game if it was wordless, cut the unnecessary introduction, and instead went with something like environmental storytelling.
There are a few positives. Most of the pixel art is nicely done, particularly some of the exterior backgrounds and enemy NPCs, who also have some smooth and well-executed animations. In some places there’s a jarring clash between pixel art and what looks like clipart – yet another strange inconsistency that stinks of no polish. While the combat is initially fiddly, it’s fairly satisfying to learn and master your enemy’s attack patterns. It turns combat into something of a rhythm game and it feels pretty good to get the hang of it.
It’s unfortunate that it hasn’t been developed into something more interesting. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to compare an indie title of this scale to the likes of Ori and the Blind Forest, or Hollow Knight, which offer similar styles of gameplay on a much larger budget, and yet, with more polished combat, a better world and story threads, a few more original ideas, and fewer sloppy inconsistencies, The Bounty Huntress could at least be a passable little game. As it is, though, it barely feels finished.
The Bounty Huntress is available from the Xbox Store
