“Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters” starts bleak and only grows more hopeless as the story goes on, and while I expected darkness from a World of Darkness setting, the problem isn’t the tone — it’s the way the narrative treats your choices. Even though I invested in the physical stat, I was rarely allowed to use it effectively, and most outcomes remained negative. Presumably this is meant to reflect how outmatched a human is against a vampire, but it doesn’t make for very engaging reading when failure feels predetermined.

What makes this even more frustrating is that the game keeps you in an artificially helpless state. A competent hunter would adapt — using fire, traps, improvised weapons, or anything that might actually harm a supernatural predator — but the story never allows that kind of escalation. It’s like shooting a tank with a pistol, watching the bullets bounce off, and then being told to keep firing instead of finding better tools. The game insists on your powerlessness, even when a real person would try something else.

I also refused to embrace crime or align with gangs for backup or income, yet the game repeatedly implies that having a ruthless gang leader ruling your neighborhood is preferable to lawlessness. But I simply couldn’t buy into that worldview. Trading one bad situation for another is still a bad situation.

What compounded this frustration is that the story often acted as if I’d made choices I explicitly avoided. I stayed out of gang politics, refused dark alliances, and handled threats mostly independently, yet the narrative still treated me as if I’d formed connections I never agreed to. Characters expressed guilt or consequences for actions my protagonist never took, and by the end, the game seemed determined to reinterpret my path into something it wasn’t. It’s the worst kind of railroading: not just limiting your choices, but rewriting them.

The romance is the one bright spot — beautifully written, emotionally grounded, and the reason I kept going. The intimacy is sweet and genuinely romantic, and those moments stand out sharply against the otherwise relentless bleakness.

Ultimately, the ending undermined the entire experience for me. Even after defeating the vampires without help from gangs or a rival faction, I was still punished with an outcome that made no sense in the context of my choices. It felt less like a tragic ending and more like the story refusing to acknowledge the path I actually took.

There’s strong writing here, and the romance is genuinely lovely, but the forced interpretations of your decisions and the insistence on hopelessness left me deeply dissatisfied. If every path leads to similar negative outcomes, it’s hard to feel like your choices matter at all. (3/10)