Carnival Hunt

TL;DR: A no with caveats. Great aesthetic, great concept, rough execution—standard Early Access fare. Recommend waiting to see how the game develops. I really want to like this game. The aesthetics are great, the concept is great, even the sound design is great. However, this is a multiplayer game, and currently the matchmaking is terrible for both sides. As a Bunny, expect to either steamroll past completely fresh Magicians who have no idea and Sisters who can't aim at all OR to get completely crushed on the first floor by people who have been playing this game for >100 hours. As the opposite team, expect to either destroy newbie Bunnies utterly or to somehow fail to eliminate anyone with no idea how they even got past you. Very few games are "close." I can't really judge the balance of the game. Despite my middling (at best) skill, somehow my MMR keeps going up. Particularly as Bunny when I survive until the end of the game by pure dint of having been thrown to the first floor and being unable to make my way to where the action is actually occurring. Similarly, you can get a "game loss" screen where the Magician is slumped over, depressed at having only caught 2 bunnies, and still have your MMR going up. Either way, I end up in too high of an MMR, and then I mostly just get destroyed. Well, aside from the Sisters, who are still broken. The devs are frantically nerfing them, but quite frankly their whole kit shows a startling lack of insight into the asymmetrical genre. They originally released Sisters with a skillshot that could insta-pick Bunnies from anywhere, an AOE stun that meant any chase could end in seconds even if you missed your skillshot, and three undetectable traps that didn't have any sort of cooldown/charge time whatsoever. The Sisters also made almost no noise, making her nearly impossible to detect for Bunnies. They've nerfed every single one of her skills and added *some* sounds, but she's still significantly stronger than the Magician if you can aim. (*Side note: I can't.*) If you go up against a particularly skilled player, you'll get locked down hard; at least against a skilled Magician, he has reasonable cooldowns to contend with. The solution, most people will tell you (aside from the ragebaiters who just love to dunk on this game) is to get better. That's hard to do when the matchmaking constantly puts you up against people with 10x your playtime or against absolute newbies. This issue should get better if the playerbase grows, but that's *not* something you can rely, particularly on in an early access game. A few other side notes: * Very little is explained, no doubt in part because the game is completely in flux. The Sisters do not yet have a working tutorial, probably because the devs are changing her so much. There's no real source of information, particularly in-game. For example, the upgrade system of gears (not the ones you put into slots in-game) is not explained at all, and getting crafting resources for it is hard as Bunny (and also not well explained—you can get those crafting resources from chests, from escaping with them in your inventory as a Bunny, or from killing Bunnies with those resources into the boxes with swords as Magician or Sisters). * Finding gears seems to be just a matter of memorizing the spots where they spawn. They shimmer a little, but because the shadows and lights are currently bugged and often pop in randomly, that sparkle does nothing to help if you're moving your character or your camera. This necessity of memorization further increases the skill gap between new players and veterans. Most new players will run around in circles on Floor 1 the entire game trying to find a single gear because they aren't placed in places you might expect and they're not easy to spot. Veterans will find the gears in seconds and have them in before the Magician or Sisters can even patrol the area once. Radars are exceedingly important to new players, but they are never explained and are vanishingly rare. * Navigating the map is often incredibly awkward. As the Magician or Sisters, prepare to slide off of ledges a lot while trying to land a snipe on a Bunny on another level. As Bunny, you're going to run into things you think you should be able to duck under or be unable to land atop things you'd think your jump can make. The rooms all look great, but they're clearly not quite optimized for actual play yet. Also, falling from a significant height as Bunny means you lose a gear (not the ones you put into slots for objectives or the ones you craft to give yourself buffs; this time, it means health, and you only get three health), which can often be worth it if you're escaping a grab but feels terrible when you fall due to poor level geometry or because it looks like you can make a jump but it's actually not possible. * Grabbing the Bunnies (your basic attack) as Magician or Sisters feels awful. I don't know if it's due to ping or server code or just a really janky hitbox, but you'll often miss grabs that you really should not have missed. Occasionally, you'll make grabs that you feel certain you shouldn't have, too, but the opposite is far more common. God forbid you ever try to grab someone off a zipline. That said, I feel like I've seen some improvement in this area, perhaps due to them implementing regional servers so ping is better? Hard to say. * Tightrope walking. There are two places where you can do this (I think?) as a Bunny, though only one of them helps you get to an objective. However, it is TERRIBLE. You have to perform a balancing minigame, which... well, I see the vision, but it's ridiculously impossible to do. I have literally taken one step on the tightrope and fallen immediately, which felt even worse because I was still on the ground but still slid off to fall down a floor and lose a health point. I get wanting to make it a hard path so that Bunnies can't just hop on it to evade a Magician, but like... is it supposed to be nearly impossible? Is there something wrong with my settings? Also, how are the Magicians supposed to grab you off of it? * The targeting for the ranged grab (the hat grab) for the Magician is pure jank. Sometimes, you'll be looking directly at a Bunny with them directly inside your reticle and unmoving, but somehow when you actually click the button you're suddenly grabbing somewhere completely different. I do like that they added a dragging functionality to it, so even if you miss you can move your hand closer, but it's also very easy to dodge if the Bunny is paying any attention at all. * The players in this game are often very toxic. The devs were smart in blocking the Magicians/Sisters from talking to the Bunnies, and I see the vision in making the Bunnies' voice chat audible to the opposing team to emphasize stealth, but it mostly means that you get a few funny moments when you startle a Bunny and you can hear their reaction, but it mostly means you get a lot more moments where a Bunny screams "♥♥♥♥ you!" or mocks you when you grab them. Not great. Still, I don't want to give the impression that my feelings towards the game are entirely or even mostly negative. The only reason I wrote this long review is because I can see how amazing this game could be. I really like a lot of the game... it's just not quite there yet. That can be fixed. I only bought the game once it came out into proper Early Access two weeks ago, so I don't really know how the devs operate yet. If they're good, they should be able to pull the game out of its Early Access mire, fix the bugs, polish the rough bits, and so forth. If they're unable to learn from their mistakes, this game will die. I don't *think* they'll do that, but I've seen a lot of good games fail in Early Access. I'd recommend that people wait for a while to see how the game develops.