Undertaker got on my radar by way of a Splattercat video, in which he called it single-player Hunt: Showdown. Having never played Hunt: Showdown, I wound up comparing it to other games instead… mostly unfavorably.

I started in a tavern, or what the game calls a tavern. It has the furniture but nothing to drink or eat, which is OK because the patrons don’t have digestive tracts – they’re undead skeletons. I couldn’t interact with them in any way, or with any items, or with any doors. This room shows off some of the (admittedly good-looking) colored lighting, and maaaaaybe it hints at some bit of worldbuilding that’s going to be in the full game, but for now it’s just a tine-wasting way to show us a monster-hunting bounty on a notice board… I hope the dev had fun putting it together, anyway.

Cut to the outdoors. There was another bounty notice pinned to a tree in front of me. The place was also littered with tombstones, broken bits of castle-looking stone wall, small plinths, and more tombstones. I think the dev was going for Gothic moodiness and overshot into teenage edgelord-dom.

I apparently ventured out into this ruined wilderness to fight monsters without a weapon or equipment of any kind; good thing I found a weapon before I found the first monster. The monster was an undead – not one of the good skeletons I was hanging out with earlier, I guess – and the weapon was a “rusty sickle,” so I amended my above assessment to preteen edgelord-dom.

It’s been a while since I played Tainted Grail, and I need to go back to it at some point. I do remember, though, accidentally talking a guard into killing himself, and some of the bandits I was going out to fight were actually starving peasants and the like. That wasn’t just edgy, it was dark in a more mature way. And if Undertaker was supposed to be evoking something like Dark Souls instead… wasn’t that dark in a more mythically resonant way? (My Dark Souls experience is secondhand, and I’m not as sure about that…)

Anyway, I progressed along the trail. I found a pistol. I found very few bullets for it and very few healing items, and the enemies hit hard enough (on Medium difficulty) to encourage stealth tactics. I didn’t mind that, at least not at first; I used to play stealth melee in Skyrim.

I climbed a ladder to find a guy in a plague-doctor outfit. Because plague doctors are edgy. He’s the bounty giver and the game’s storefront, and that storefront is where I saw the next level of melee weapon, a big honkin’ executioner’s axe. Edgy.

Side note: the enemies weren’t dropping loot; what money I had had been picked up off the ground. I don’t mind silver as a currency, because gold would have been too D&D-video-gamey, but do you know what a pile of dull silver coins looks like when it’s on the mossy, leafy, gravelly ground at even a short distance? More gravel. So in between sneak attacks, I found myself nearly sniffing the ground in odd corners.

Another side note, on worldbuilding: draugr, 13th to 14th century; plague doctors, 17th century; and a saxophone from the 19th or 20th century.. In hindsight, I’m less surprrised by the tavern’s mantel cclock…

Anyway, on to the next area, tougher skeletons, and slightly more varied loot. On to the area after that, with even tougher skeletons, including one bulky melee bastard I only beat by cheesing his inability to jump down a ledge. I started finding invisible walls, ruined buildings I could see into but not enter, and a waterfall and stream that… I hesitate to fault a solo dev for water textures, but is this place downstream of the Tron universe?

Half the challenge is that, when you aren’t sneak-attacking the enemy, they may take a few hits to go down, and so do you – they hit like trucks. The other half is resource scarcity. Pistol bullets are 10 silver apiece from the plague doctor; the enemy won’t drop anything, placed loot in the level is uncommon, and if you look behind a nearby tree you might find a pile of 20 silver or an empty tin can that’s sellable for 13.

There’s a fire spell that uses stamina instead of ammo; it costs, IIRC, 1,200. If there’s a healing spell, I didn’t find it.

The possibly-unintended third half of the challenge is a deviation from the usual stealth game power balance: I often wouldn’t spot enemies before I was in danger of them spotting me. They’re undead; they don’t chatter. Some have glow effects… which are subtle enough to be easy to miss. They do move, on short patrol paths, but they also often have the silver-coin problem: their models blended in with the textured grays of the background. I’d occasionally notice the detection meter filling and have no idea where it was coming from; it doesn’t give you a directional hint until it’s almost full.

And another side note on worldbuilding: WTF are draugr and wendigos doing in the same game? They aren’t just synonyms for undead; they’re folklore from different fucking continents.

 

I put the demo down after about an hour and a half; I’d seen enough. I might revisit Undertaker at release, but I haven’t wishlisted it.