“A muddy, horny, trend-chasing mess”
To the dark ages in HUNTED: THE DEMON’S FORGE
There’s a sad desperation that emanates from Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. Published by Bethesda and developed by InXile, it should by rights by a great fantasy RPG—but released at a time of real insecurity in the genre, it’s instead a muddy, horny, trendchasing mess.
Released in 2011, it’s caught between playing to the developer’s strengths as RPG veterans, and pressure to appeal to a broader audience at a time when Gears of War was still king. It’s a muddled mix of fantasy world-building and macho nonsense.
The two playable characters are a musclebound meathead, and a female elf wearing an outfit that amounts to about four thin belts. Exposed as she already is at all times, the camera still feels like it’s trying to film right up the back of her meagre skirt whenever you do anything saucy, like, y’know, pick up some arrows or run to the next objective.
That objective being dictated to you by a quest-giving sorceress similarly memorable only for her impractical underwear. She’s introduced as the subject of the meathead’s romantic dreams before turning out to be real—which makes sense, because she does look like she’s someone’s fantasy of a goth girlfriend. The fact that Lucy Lawless voices her is either a gift or an insult to Xena: Warrior Princess fans.
BLOODY HELL
You journey across a self-consciously dark and gritty realm, where the villains are blood-splattered monstrosities, the skies are perpetually gray, and even the heroes are selfish mercenaries. Everything is so evil looking it actually becomes confusing—all the characters look like villains, and there’s no sense of what this world was before everything started going to shit halfway through the tutorial.
It’s strange going back to this era of RPGs. Hunted is an extreme example, but even classics like
2009’s Dragon Age Origins are marred by some similar sensibilities, seemingly desperate to be seen as ‘mature’ (pointlessly edgy) and appeal to a broader audience (of horny teenage boys). Why I am playing Hunted in 2022? Well, it’s good to remind yourself how far we’ve come.