Big Robot Games has finally released their survival stealth based game Sir, You Are Being Hunted after a lengthy period of gestation, and we wanted to see what all the fuss was about with these polite robots hunting us.
Sir, You Are Being Hunted has drawn comparisons to Rust and Don’t Starve with its use of procedural generation and wacky robot enemy types. Sir, You Are Being Hunted took to Kickstarter in 2012 and has been another success story for crowd-funding. But does it live up to the hype?
At the start of each game, you awaken next to a large Rune Stone seemingly connected to a device that you made in the past, relating to the state of the current world. You are only vaguely guided by your increasingly passive-aggressive butler speaking to you by ways that have not yet been made clear, and as you play he informs you of your current predicament and ultimate objective: you must venture out and retrieve 16 pieces of the Rune Stone in an attempt to reactivate the device and return you home in time for “dinner”, as he states it.
These Rune Stones are scattered across a chain of five procedurally generated islands, infested with homicidal Victorian robots that enjoy a good sport. Sir, You Are Being Hunted is part of the procedurally generated crazy that has taken the indie game community by storm with the increased popularity of roguelike games. With randomly generated level layouts based on a set of parameters to create a different and “unique” level every time you load up a new game. Most randomly generated games provide the option to change what parameters are present to help create a specialized gaming experience for your play style, and Sir, You Are Being Hunted is no exception.
Unfortunately, regardless of what parameters you set before you start your new game, everything more or less looks the same. Every biome within Sir, You Are Being Hunted is consists of muted greens and browns, with varying levels of foliage and towns for you to plunder in your quest to survive the robot apocalypse. Some biomes do add unique elements - such as castles and wind turbines – but everything blends together into something that isn’t exactly visually appealing. While the robots themselves look pretty cool, the scenery and buildings look dull and uninteresting, with little variation between them.
Furthermore, none of the buildings can be entered. The only way to “loot” them is to activate the door, which brings up an inventory screen. The buildings might as well be large treasure chests hidden throughout the environment that you have to seek out while you avoid detection. We understand the limited capabilities of a Kickstarter-funded game, but we really feel that this was a feature that would have benefited the overall experience.
These small clusters of buildings and villages are also where you will find your primary source of supplies, and the primary location for many of your robotic pursuers. However, you really aren’t being hunted by robots so much as you are being patrolled by robots. They all follow predictable paths between the clusters of buildings and roads that run the network of each individual island. Being attacked or spotted by robots is largely a matter of choice, as you can easily avoid them altogether and salvage smaller caches of equipment. These smaller equipment stashes are more than enough to handle any guards around any of the moonstones that you will come across.
You are able to find several firearms as means of defending yourself against the robots, but you are also wisely cautioned against it by your snide butler. It’s just as well; the controls feel sluggish, making aiming your weapon feel clunky at best, as though your arms are mired in treacle. Eventually, we completely ignored any guns and bullets we found, in favor of items more useful for stealth-based play. A properly thrown bottle is enough to distract robots for a reasonable amount of time while you plunder a building or retrieve a rune stone.
While Sir, You Are Being Hunted does support gamepads, playing with a controller never feels fully responsive. It’s a shame that in an age where a decent standard of gamepad support is all but expected from most modern PC games, here you feel hampered unless you use the more traditional method of mouse and keyboard.
However, don’t fret: if the poor gamepad controls get you killed, you’ll be relieved to know that there’s no real penalty to death outside of re-spawning at your last save point - which shouldn’t be too far away from where you perished, as the islands are on the small side. This detracts from any level of urgency and threat, and quickly removes any tension from the game. Permanent death is a staple of roguelike games and can turn basic gameplay mechanics into something tense and enjoyable. Removing any meaningful death penalty means there’s nothing to fear: get caught and die, and you can simply hit the reload button. It turns what should be a tense game based on stealth and evasion into something more akin to a simple war of attrition.
Like all roguelikes, Sir, You Are Being Hunted has a set of rules that are vaguely explained to you, requiring a level of experimentation and exploration before you truly feel like you understand what’s going on. This adds to the tension and difficulty by necessitating a trial-and-error approach. However, on our first playthrough we were easily able to decipher the rules quickly enough to beat the game within a few hours - and it only took that long because it was a pain to find the last few Rune Stones. The robots all behave in a very predictable way, and while there are a number of different enemy types, only one - a mechanical horse rider - poses any real threat.
Nevertheless, we appreciate the character design. Each individual robot type sports steampunk-inspired styling, as well as a corny, rigid robotic voice. While sometimes difficult to understand, their utterances are still humorous and work well to convey their mechanized nature.
However, the voice work is really the only part of the sound design that we enjoy. Hit anything with a melee weapon and it always sounds like someone taking a bat to a garage door, and none of the other effects sound as natural as they should. The music is also underwhelming. While the developer was clearly aiming for atmospheric ambiance, in an attempt to make the game feel eerie, it ends up sounding simply like a cacophony of noise.
One thing that we do like is the added feature of being able to make the game gender specific. A simple button click on the main menu transforms the game into Madam, You Are Being Hunted, changing everything from the title to the game’s dialogue. Gaming should be more gender-inclusive, and there’s a growing movement to make games as open to women as it is to men. Big Robot has thankfully recognized that fact, and acted accordingly.
It’s unfortunate that we have so much to say about Sir, You Are Being Hunted, and not much of it is positive. The game is a Kickstarter success story, and the developers clearly treated it as a labor of love. Whatever you may think of its origins, crowd-funding is not going away and the more developers reach their goals and deliver a working product the better it is for indie gaming. It’s just a shame that Sir, You Are Being Hunted hasn’t quite ended up as the poster child for crowd-funded games that we hoped for.
Despite having plenty of interesting ideas and bags of personality, Sir, You Are Being Hunted doesn’t have what matters most - enjoyable gameplay. While it’s possible that further post-release development could see the experience improving over time with the addition of more gameplay mechanics and more robust AI, as it stands, it’s difficult to recommend.
Does that compute?
Brian Kale
@brianwkale
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