A dilapidated carnival, terrifying monsters on the prowl, wind-up bunnies just trying to survive.
Scrolling through YouTube, as you do, you stumble across a peculiar video game trailer. Intrigued, you click on it to see if it’s worth your time. And just like that, you find yourself terrified, yet wanting more. That is the feeling the cinematic trailer for Carnival Hunt invoked in me. This is an upcoming first-person asymmetric multiplayer horror game from Mongolian developer Beer Night Studio.
Carnival Hunt was first announced in 2022, originally set to release that same year. And while a few progress videos were published, we’ve seen very little of the actual game itself (which has all too often been a red flag that there isn’t really a game yet).
But instead of disappearing into development hell, a new Carnival Hunt trailer dropped earlier this month, giving me renewed hope for this horrible little oddity.
Grab your friends and play as a wind-up bunny or the equally wound-up Carnival Monsters hunting them. Everyone has a limited amount of charge, and it’s a race against time as your internal mechanisms slowly wind down. The bunnies have to outlast the monsters’ charge to survive while making sure they don’t run out of charge themselves. If the bunnies get caught, the monsters kill them and steal their wind-up keys to keep themselves going.
There is a way for the bunnies to hide, though it’s a bit unnerving. Bodies of dead bunnies are scattered throughout the map, and if there’s a monster closing in, your live bunny can hide among the corpses. But that doesn’t make you completely safe because whoever is playing the monster can choose to look through the corpses (though it will cost them some charge). It’s an interesting concept, making everything from hiding with corpses to sifting through them as a monster carry some degree of risk.
Monster-wise, the trailers have only showed the Magician so far, presumably the main monster. Seen in a video posted by YouTuber gimji, the Magician is dressed in a tattered tuxedo with pale eyes and an impossibly wide grin. As if that wasn’t creepy enough, his bio states that he sacrifices children and/or bunnies to get what he wants. The other two monsters discussed are the Clown, and Ma the Bird Lady. While the Clown has no bio, with the stitched-on face, sharp-toothed grin, and hole in his chest, this is not the kind of entertainer you want at a kids’ birthday party.
Ma is more robust and has something of a tragic backstory, having mysteriously lost her child. She appears to have clothing and toys stitched into her body, causing some of the wounds to bleed. Carrying a staff made of dismembered arms, Ma is also accompanied by four faceless pseudo-children, her assistants. Presumably you’ll have to deal with them in addition to her.
I’m intrigued by Carnival Hunt’s claustrophobic atmosphere, constant fear of death, and never knowing when a monster will appear – it really brings horror back to the roots. I can only imagine how high the tension will be when playing dead among the corpses. It’s unclear if there’s much of a story here, but not every game has to have one to be enjoyable.
Carnival Hunt is yet to get a release date, though its Steam page says it’ll drop sometime this year. Beer Night Studio will be launching a Kickstarter campaign for it at some point, though even that has no definitive date. I hope it happens, because in an era of endless sequels and rehashes, a bit of originality is just what we need.
