Sir, You Are Being Hunted
“The line between horror and comedy is pretty thin and one can quickly become the other,” said Jim Rossignol when he spoke to The Skinny about his team's latest game Sir, You Are Being Hunted. If blurring the line between those emotions was the main goal of developer Big Robot, then they can rest assured that the finished product is a signifier of a job well done.
Pitched somewhere between Straw Dogs, The League of Gentlemen and Dr. Who, Sir is a thoroughly British endeavour through and through. Played out over five procedurally-generated islands, the aim is to find 17 crystal shards needed to remake your transporter and escape a land populated by upper-class, killer robots intent on making you mincemeat. It’s a simple premise with little flourish but it’s enough for Sir to sink its metal teeth into you from the outset.
Billed as a survival horror, Sir may have a steep learning curve to rival other recent entries of the genre, but it’s not without its own colloquial charm and a fair few laughs. Approach the game's antagonists up wind and you may hear snippets of laughably stereotyped, British conversations involving the weather or having a cup of tea. Search an abandoned building and instead of weapons or food supplies, you may come out with a playable trombone. Day Z this is not.
Yet when the action kicks in, Sir is as brutal and electrifying as these games come. The ferocity, tenacity and relentlessness of the robots is immediately at odds with their demeanour and helps elevate a genuine tension that many other straight-ahead survival games never do. Meanwhile, the relatively simple graphic style may not win admiring glances for its technical prowess, but it can still paint a gorgeous image to anyone who has ever explored the countryside with a child-like imagination.
However, the simplicity does grind after a time and even the escalating classes of robots doesn’t offer enough variety around this. The difficulty will also likely put off some players drawn to the rather offbeat style, which is something of a shame. Those who wish to use their trusty old 360 pad may also feel penalised by a somewhat illogical control layout when entering the inventory, exacerbated by the in-game screen prompts which seem to be exclusively designed for mouse and keyboard configuration. PC purists and their WASD keys may bemoan this but as a relatively arcade-style game it seems a fair gripe.
It’s all small stuff though and with this being but version 1.0 there will likely be a few more nips and tucks along the way. However, the core of Sir will likely remain intact and within that lies a strangely twee yet nerve-shredding affair. Its surface simplicity might wane on you after a time and its difficulty will certainly challenge all comers, but for all its metallic exterior and cold, hard brutality, Sir, You Are Being Hunted has a lot of heart.