Unity - Hunt and Snare [r34c] [Rufflenecks]

[updated for r30]

hunt and snare is a lot of goddamn walking until it isn't.

that statement is a little more nuanced than a first glance might suggest -- i do like this game, after all, and have been following it for a few years now. that said, its pacing is complete dogshit, and presents the game's biggest weakness.

the main island, skiia, is enormous; so big that you can comfortably toggle autorun, go to another room to brood or whatever, and return to find yourself not even halfway to your destination. and you had better get used to walking everywhere, because you can't just sail to the nearest coastline, captain, that unreleased feature has been in-dev for time immemorial. hope you can survive on just a single fast travel point.

walking places is incredibly unsexy gameplay. sure, the game tries to spice it up a bit: tranquilizing various furries and thereafter swapping fluids with them is the second most prominent gameplay mechanic behind holding down shift and W at the same time, and it's done passively via exploration. this plus looting for cash, clothes, and piercings sounds like it would make for a refreshing, original 3d RPG, but the sheer amount of walking and walking and walking very nearly collapses the whole game.

thankfully, hunt and snare has a few things going for it that juuust manage to tip the scales in its favor. for one, the writing is solid, presenting unique worldbuilding (read: it would work outside of porn) and some likeable dialogue. it's well-edited for an h-game, and exhausting the characters' dialogue trees just for its own sake is usually worth your time even if there's no scene at the end of it. on top of that, the background lore is intriguing without revealing too much -- key to good worldbuilding, in my opinion.

the premise is something like this: you're a hunter, and you hunt feral furries who live in the woods, because they can reproduce and sentient ones can't. doping them up with the literal blood of God makes them sentient and allows you to introduce them into polite society, clothing optional. simple, except several encounters imply that maybe God isn't so much God as he is perhaps a demigod, or minor god, or demiurge, or whatever. interesting stuff!

speaking of the writing, it shines in the scripted h-scenes, which are bar none the best part of the game. while most fuckable characters have a preference for poon or peen, the selection is pretty balanced, so you don't have to sacrifice your autogynephilia preferences for the sake of more options. the randomly-generated scenes with your formerly-roofied hoes are less stellar, but the sheer variety of poses keeps things fresh throughout the game, even if there's no cum at all outside of the narrative telling you someone came.

besides the sex itself, the piercing system does a phenomenal job at sexing up the game, and is possibly my favorite feature in any porn game ever. the sheer variety is fantastic: you can pierce tits, genitalia, brows, noses, ears, everything. there're at least 20 slots for piercings alone and tons of them to find out in the world. it almost entirely makes up for the lackluster early-game clothing options, which are limited to pirate stuff and lingerie, because this is game where you own a boat and have sex a lot.

the high notes fall a little flat due to the character models, sadly. the character creator in particular is in desperate need of more sliders a la modded skyrim's CBBE; it is very difficult to make anything other than generically attractive skinny-waist girls and generically attractive twinks. since my type is "built like a fridge," this means a few docked points. adding on the too-big heads, the vacant stares, and the always-hanging-open mouths; the sex sometimes becomes a little stilted, like smushing barbies against each other.

so, the game sounds like a good idea on paper, but it's torpedoed by geologically slow gameplay and poor customization, right? WRONG.

well, half wrong. the thing is, the game has a whole second island beyond skiia, where all of these problems completely melt away.

the walking? fixed. kizan is half the size of skiia but with about the same amount of loot and environments, so you get all the exploring at a reasonable pace. also, there's better fast travel now. the meh clothing? boom, gone. it's all tribal shit here: everyone's wearing sexy toga thingies that do absolutely nothing to cover the goods. the character models? eh, still weird and doll-like, but i'm a scalie before i'm a furry, and the whole goddamn jungle is full of lizard people. it's a win in my book. on top of that, it's gorgeous, and puts skiia's open plains to shame with its dense rainforests and sweet fantasy water-wall.

this all brings me back to my point. hunt and snare is walking until it isn't, and the second island represents both a literal and figurative interpretation of that one-liner. on the literal side, it cuts out all the walking, and on the figurative side, it shows that the devs (dev? singular?) have realized that their initial plan for furry Skyrim with sex was too ambitious and tried to scale the game down to a reasonable size. hopefully, this means that future additions to hunt and snare will follow this philosophy of a small, dense open world instead of a sprawling, barren one. lord knows the world needs a good 3D furry RPG that can run on a laptop. carnal instinct doesn't count.

in the meantime, if you decide to try this game out, i highly recommend you install Tabby's excellent I don't have time for this mod and rebind autorun from numlock to middle mouse.

So far this is just a technical demo, the amount of actual content is sufficient for around 5-15min of gameplay, porn content for 5 min, maybe 10 if you take your time.

On the positive side i was surprised that you can swim and there is swimming animation.

Update for r5.24.3 (tldr: Really good options menu, better general optimization.)

Options menu is really good, lets you set quality level up while keeping performance good. General optimization is noticeably better.

Update for r5.24.1 (tldr: Getting better, slowly but surely.)

City is much bigger now, layout has changed. Many new NPCs around, with many things to talk about and have fun with. New NPCs are in the city and in the wilds. Terrain was updated a bit with rivers and landmarks. Bartender's quest is doable in full.
Performance took a massive hit (my PC is below minspecs, using old_processor beta branch on steam, but can handle most modern games without much problems, 40+ fps fhd in BotN and MGI: P on high). In r5.23 I was able to get steady 40+fps on medium and 25-30 on high. Now I get less than 10 on medium. High fps on low, but not enjoyable to look at.
Next update is advanced options menu. Waiting patiently.

Rating for version r5.23

Stability: No crashes, but it requires "modern" CPU to work with latest optimisations (SSE4.1 support). General performance is sad, no optimisation whatsoever, especially lighting and shadows, easily can cut fps 3-4 times, sun is like thousand light sources, even in the showroom fps drops are insane. Can't see 2 gigs of vram on my 2gb card, but then happily eats away all 2gb on high settings.

Content: Pre-alpha state, for now it lacks systems like inventory, proper save system (some barebone save system was implemented in r5.23), prey management, ship activities, shops, active NPCs, etc.

Systems that were implemented in some basic but functional way: character creation, day and night, movement with sneaking, swimming (no diving), passive NPCs, wild "prey" NPCs, dialogues, shooting, tracking (long lasting footprints) and hunting, map with markers, questing and sex scenes. Everything is basic, but works surprisingly well. There is a showroom to see all animations with different characters. Jiggle is there, jello type jiggle.

Gameplay: Basically VN in 3D environment for now, you talk to NPCs, play dialogue choice minigame, get a sex scene, or simple quest that leads to a sex scene. Or you shoot wild NPCs with tranquilizer, put a collar on them and then sex them in different positions in some specific points. Only one prey can follow you and game doesn't save your prey yet.

Graphics and Style: Environments are really basic, main city hub is just bunch of asset store buildings glued together. Terrain is...it's there I guess, no landmarks other than mountains, so it's hard to navigate without using map constantly. Trees, grass look samey but okay, it's easy to never find knocked out prey in the tall grass. Character models are really good, cartoonish style, but highpoly and smooth. Body parts with enabled physics have seams, even on a statue in town they are visible on chest area. Char textures are noticeably hand drawn, if you've used drawing software like PS or Krita, you'll recognize familiar brush strokes. But in general they look good (more fur strokes needed though, or some fur texture underneath, sometimes it looks like leather or latex). Animations are top notch, scene controls are basic, but speed, camera rotation and pov options are there.

FUN: Sex scenes are high quality and poses are plentiful, with variations depending on genders (names of FF handjob scenes made me lol). Nothing bad to say about. Gameplay is really barebones and with canine prey spawning really far away, it can take 10-30 minutes just to get there, so many players won't even see them. Characters are interesting and unique enough to remember them. Quests are good, they require you to read and remember to get proper rewards, but one quest-minigame in particular requires you to know a thing from the game world you just can't possibly know (Sterling scene minigame. Is there a way?), so it will take you several restarts to get. One of the quests isn't finished yet. Other than that, it's fun for a couple of hours per character gender.

Conclusion: Interesting game with interesting ideas. Can get you 3-5 hours of fun in its current state. Got it on steam, do not regret spending money. If development will not stop within next 6 months, will throw more money on it. Especially if there will be more optimization, dropping down from 80+fps on low to 20 on medium with graphics like this is a no-no. Project is really ambitious for such a small team, but I want to believe. Next patch will be available Jun-Jul 2019.

tip: F1-F5 will change graphic settings in game, F1 - low, F2 - med, F3 - high, F4 - ultra, F5 - scale x2.

Okay, first, not a fan of furries but tried it because it's 3d, there is a potential but also some problems.

If you talk about animations, there are tons of them. Problem is they are free to get. You can get like 100 animations in few hours. In games like these you have to work to get the content, this should be the case here too. There should be challenges. For example, hard to find, rare animations. Rare creatures. Secrets, more NPC's.

Ofcourse it's a new game so maybe they will be added but in it's current state it's just a game where you can watch tons of animations, if that's your thing it's a good game.

r4.21: Promising open world furry. The development may be long and in the meantime we have a good overview of the animated loops that can meet directly from the menu. These are well made and fluid. Possible to choose the dating preferences (female, male, futa, ...). I hope the creator will have enough motivation to continue and improve this great potential.