There is a place, cursed and dark, sprawling and unknowable, where the doomed roam and monsters lurk. It's a land of magic and fortune. Get lucky, and you could spend the rest of your life in luxury. Lose out, and you'll end up just another corpse in the streets.
It's called ‘Toronto’, in the fantasy realm of ‘Canada’, and it's the setting for Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair, an ugly-beautiful RPG and immersive sim from dev Oleander Garden. In an always-moonlit Hogtown, you play some kind of amateur alchemist/warlock/domestic terrorist on a quest to, well, do whatever, really. There's not a great deal of direction. Instead, Hexcraft just presents you with a meaty jumble of mechanics, plus some estradiol, and sends you out into the deep, dark world.
Which is, at first, disorienting, but once you realise what Hexcraft wants from you—nothing at all—is possibly the most liberating gameplay experience you can have. It's a bit like breaking in a pair of leather shoes: discomforting at first, perhaps painful, but once you've properly melded you can't imagine wearing anything else.
There's not much in the way of grand narrative, so the whole thing feels almost more like the foundation for a game rather than a game itself, but it's a damn strong one. Imagine a mix-up of Morrowind's stat system, Vampire: The Masquerade's vibe, and a sprinkle of RimWorld-y NPC goals and motivations, and you pretty much have it. Yes, I know that sounds like the greatest videogame ever made. I'm excited too.
Who you actually play is a person named Vivian, but beyond that the main character is unknown to me. Your verbs for interacting with Dark Toronto are many and varied. You can mix and match liquids and herbs—gasoline and mustard, for instance—to create concoctions that temporarily boost your stats. Buff up your strength, move with more speed, that kind of thing (like I said, Morrowind-y). You can also cast from a spellbook, though I never managed to find a spell beyond the two you start with, and one of those requires a full moon. The other is called ‘Benediction’ and I think heals you? Maybe? There's a lot to think about.
It's only appropriate that I finally picked this up, three years after it came out, in the wake of Stalker 2's release, because I imagine it will have a similar effect on anyone who plays it. It's the same design philosophy of a world that has no interest in easing you into it or signposting what's interesting. You can either pick away at it—explore, die, explore again—or throw your hands up in frustration and do something else. Neither option is wrong, but I've always been a sicko for that kind of intransigent thing—a game that only unfolds its secrets if you make an effort. In Hexcraft's case, those secrets are weird, hidden cults, new gear and weapons, and exciting and novel ways to die.
My adventures in Toronto have taken me high, low, and lower. From the tunnels that snake under the PATH system to the rat-and-cultist-infested warrens of the ravine. I've treated with witches in Chinatown and been killed by werewolves in the railyard. And sometimes none of that happened at all. Hexcraft's description boasts a "litany of simulated characters with their own thoughts, feelings, and goals, moving dynamically through the overworld."
So while one run saw me meet my grisly end at the paws of a lycanthrope in the train station, another led me to the company of some indolent friend of Vivian’s, who lounged around, babbling that "I am a fatal virus, I am a circuit fault. Were it up to me, I'd be nothing, nothing at all." Hump day, I guess.
It's not a wildly complex system, mind you. This isn't Dwarf Fortress, but Hexcraft’s simulation adds a bit of spice and texture to a game whose ultimate goal is for you to poke at it and see what happens. A concentrated distillation of the bits of immsims you take with you in memory: stumbling into a backroom and finding some sick gear (a molotov cocktail), then making use of that gear to solve some later problem (I set fire to someone's bedroom by mistake and killed them, which at least netted me all their money and two handguns).
So if you're the kind of sicko who likes that stubborn, old-school design philosophy, and the parts of immersive sims where you're just drifting around hub areas looking for secrets to uncover and keys to steal, give Hexcraft a go. It's $13 (£10.19) on Steam and Itch.
