Blue Hunter is a roguelike deckbuilder RPG where your quest for godhood must start with hunting them down. Read our review of its early access build to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Everything We Know About Blue Hunter
Blue Hunter Story Plot
Welcome to Hell.
Brave the trials, monsters, and gods of Hell to become one yourself! Raise your own army of monsters, unlock your latent abilities, and eliminate any thing that stands before you. How far can you go?
Blue Hunter Gameplay
Blue Hunter is a deckbuilding roguelike with simple RPG elements. The goal is to defeat all of the Gods to become one yourself, which is done through descending Hell and hunting them down as a hunter. Similar to games like Slay The Spire and Monster Train, the game puts you in a quest to descend the floors of Hell and explore rooms with different effects.
The core foundation of the game is built on defeating monsters and adding them into your deck of cards to strengthen your offense. Another part of the game’s progression is leveling up through battle and increasing your stats to both strengthen your passive attributes (ie. attack damage, critical chance, base mana, health, etc.) and to unlock new skills to help you in battle throughout your run.
Blue Hunter Review
Extremely Simple, Yet Has Godly Potential
Roguelike deckbuilding games have definitely become a more popular genre over the past few years. With games like Balatro and Slay The Spire leading the charge, it’s no surprise that there are more and more of the genre has become a staple single player experience.
With that comes Blue Hunter, another roguelike deckbuilding game that doesn’t really wow you with mindblowing strategy or crazy mechanics. But it does prove that being a simple game doesn’t exactly mean that it’s bad either.
All About The Descent
The game’s audiovisuals aren’t all that, truthfully speaking. The way everything is presented is something you’d find in a game like Etrian Odyssey, where it’s kind of like a first-person perspective. You pick between two starting classes, Assassin and Warrior, which functions as your starting deck.
They’re also very different from each other, like Assassin is more straightforward with its playstyle of crits and big damage and Warrior is more of playing around status effects. These also affect the passive bonus stat additions that a class gets, where Assassin has a bonuses for Strength, Agility, and Dexterity and Warrior only has bonuses for Strength and Vitality.
The goal is simple—defeat the god of the set of floors to advance to the next level. While you can just rush through by opening treasure rooms, going to the Shop, and gambling on random encounters, you’d quickly realize that you’d be making your run a lot more difficult by doing so.
The Gameplay Loop is Simple, Yet Surprisingly Deep
Deckbuilding is an essential part of roguelike card games and it’s no different in Blue Hunter. You’re encouraged to fight monsters as combat is the main way of strengthening yourself. You will also have side objectives during combat to give you a permanent additional ability, grant you an additional level, and even give you more gold to spend. It’s also noteworthy that your starting class also determines what each card does, meaning a card is not the same when you use a different class.
Defeating monsters would directly allow you to add them to your deck. This leads to discovering the card effects for yourself, and what type of playstyle do want to choose. If you choose to not add the monster, you can simply "release" it and have additional gold instead. The sheer simplicity of the whole system is actually quite impressive. You basically capture the defeated monsters and turn them into your cards and build a deck out of it.
Boss monsters and Gods are actually potential additions to your deck as well, and but don’t discount the random monster encounters too. An example of this is a random monster card that uses all of your mana to set the cost of the cards in your hand to 0, which is absolutely massive if you have other cards that can set up big draws.
This is the game’s best strength, as it had me thinking of ways to make combos work in my deck. When I started to put more time into it, I also considered to remove even more cards from my deck so I could focus on only the combo every turn. There was also a run where I kept drawing to build around a card that dealt a massive amount of damage if my deck was empty.
More to Come
Since the game is still in Early Access, it’s still quite lacking in terms of content and replayability. However, the potential is there for limitless deck builds and variety that can tickle your brain. The only thing going for its replayability right now is that the game’s seed is dependent on you, since you’re going to be the one to input it in game.
Knowing that starting classes change cards entirely is going to a treat for those who love experimentation and discovering new deck builds. I’m excited to see where things go from here, as it’s got the makings of being a big time sink with how fun and simple the game is.
| Digital Storefronts |
|---|
 Steam |
| $14.99 |
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Blue Hunter Product Information
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| Title | BLUE HUNTER |
|---|---|
| Release Date | November 29, 2024 |
| Developer | NourSaiFR |
| Publisher | NourSaiFR |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Roguelike, Card, RPG, Indie |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | TBD |
| Official Website | Blue Hunter Official Website |
