Dark Hunting Ground just dropped on Steam yesterday—and it’s not here to tell you a story.
This is the anti-story RPG. No cutscenes, no lore dumps, no forced epic narrative about a dying kingdom.
Instead, it’s you, your build, and an arena that keeps asking if you’re strong enough to keep going. Enemies swarm, loot drops, bosses fall, and the difficulty ratchets up. That’s the loop. That’s the game.
On the surface it looks stripped down—minimalist black and white with color only where it matters, like Atari 2600 by way of Adobe Flash. But don’t mistake that for shallow.
This thing is loaded with systems. Six different classes: Warrior, Assassin, Scholar, Ranger, Summoner, Guardian. Eighteen skills that mutate depending on how you socket them. Slates, relics, Abyssal Eyes, Talents, Flasks, a Dark Tree, a Chaos Atlas, Cognition layers—enough knobs and dials to make spreadsheet junkies drool. If Legend of Zelda is a novel, Dark Hunting Ground is a scalpel.
Developer BingX may be new to the scene, but for a debut, this game is absurdly confident. During Early Access they kept dropping features: cloud saves, auto-craft, boss rematch loops, build-preset saving, loot filters, auto-pickup. Now at 1.0, the package feels tight.
Steam flags full controller support—Xbox and PlayStation pads work fine—but keyboard and mouse aiming is as good as it gets. Windows and Mac run natively, and while Linux isn’t officially supported, Proton plays it without a hiccup.
The only real hole is sound. Minimalist visuals I can handle. Minimalist sound, though, gets old. There’s not much in the way of music, and combat sounds are thin—mostly weapon clinks and slashes. It feels intentional, but also feels empty.
Reviews on Steam are already leaning Very Positive, though some players are complaining about punishing Chaos crafting and spikes in endgame difficulty. Personally, I think that’s part of the DNA.
Price is C$11.89 on launch sale. For what it is, that’s not nothing. But it is fun. The grind works. The arenas pull you in. The loot treadmill delivers that “just one more run” itch.
If you need sweeping narrative arcs and emotional beats, skip this. If you want an action RPG boiled down to its purest form—kill, loot, build, repeat—then Dark Hunting Ground is exactly what the name promises.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2494810/Dark_Hunting_Ground/
Ah, then I don’t want it.
