Title: Sir, You Are Being Hunted
Developer: Big Robot
What I Think: Sir, You Are Being Hunted (or just ‘Sir..’ because typing out the whole title is strenuous and repetitive for both me, the writer, and you, the reader) is an atmospheric indie semi-horror survival game. Yes, we did a similar game last month in the Betrayer Game At A Glance, but these games are cool and deserve recognition. Anyway, ‘Sir..’ is a game where you are told by a narrator that an experiment has gone wrong and you are stuck on an archipelago of 5 islands. All of these islands can have different biomes-you can choose from the options of fens (marshes), rural, castles, mountains and industrial. These different biomes are extremely varied with differing characteristics. For example, the industrial biome has one large city with a lot of buildings, junkyards and a canal with some overgrown grass, while the rural biome has a few scattered villages with the occasional stately home, church, and random forest. To get off the archipelago, you have to reconstruct a device which has broken into separate pieces across the islands. Sound easy? Well, you have to find food to stay alive, which involves either hunting or scavenging. Still sound simple? There’s an army of killer robots after you, who are much more numerous and better equipped. They will be guarding the device pieces as well as most settlements, so you have to find a way to outwit them. Or you can just whack them with a handy axe you found. But you have to plan accordingly, as many actions can attract those who hunt you. If you startle a flock of birds, any nearby patrols will head towards you. If you start a fire to cook, you have a maximum of two minutes before the robots are on you, if you’re lucky. If you fire a gun, it can be heard for miles across the still rural landscape, so make any combat quick. But this also works in reverse- flocks of birds and startled rabbits can alert you to robot patrols and where they’re coming from. By the way, staying off roads is a foolproof strategy. As you collect more pieces, more and varying types of robots enter the game for an increasingly difficult challenge.
Would I Recommend It? If you like stealth and you like survival, ‘Sir…‘ certainly blends those two together extremely well. However, if you like your meat-head shooters (Gears of War, Call of Duty, etc) you might get a bit bored after being forced to take refuge in a cornfield and having very limited room for weapons in your inventory. The game is very humorous in an offbeat British sense; the robots smoke pipes, wear tweed suits, and make quips about the weather, statistic that appears upon death is “tea drunk”. The graphics look good, although some textures are a little off, and there are some similarities to Betrayer, particularly in the flight/fight emphasis and the need to use your environment to your advantage. I’d advise you to pick it up if you enjoyed Betrayer or any game in that vein, but it might take you a while to get into it.
Overall Score: 7/10
Words by Gabriel Rutherford