Roblox - The Hunt, Part 1

Posted by starsystemerror on Mar 28, 2024

So, Roblox did something this year called The Hunt. I haven’t been a Roblox player for nearly long enough to be aware of the history and relevance of the “egg hunt” event phenomenon, but I’m aware this is a sort of Easter-like treasure hunt kind of thing. Basically, there’s a bunch of games participating in this event, and if you go into each game and do a certain task to win a badge from the event, it’s counted in the main Hunt world. Every few badges you win gets you an item you can wear on your avatar. I don’t really care that much for any of the items, but I do like doing silly little events, so I decided I would give The Hunt a shot.

A lot of these games are extremely popular, and I actually don’t play a lot of super popular Roblox games. There are some I do play frequently, but when it comes to game-surfing, I tend to opt for games with a lower player count. All that is to say, I don’t know a thing about some of the most popular games on the platform! I decided to use this event as a way to check out a few of them and see what I think, as well as how well the challenges for The Hunt were implemented, especially for someone who hasn’t played the games before.

Disclaimer: I am a very casual player of Roblox. All of this was only done to the extent to which I found it fun. I did not play all of the games, or even most of them. However, here is a list of the games I did play as part of this event, in order of when I played them, so you can read my descent into madness.

Wild Horse Islands

I’ll admit, I have played this one before. Not very much, though. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing, and I had a level one horse, and I knew the basic controls, and that was it. Thankfully the challenge was easily accessible from the main island, with a big map marker showing you where to go to start it. It was completable without much skill, and you didn’t have to have a fancy horse or anything. You just had to run to the end of a “race” that was just a path through a neon block world. It was kinda cute. And the time or place you finished the race didn’t matter, so my level one horse and I could take our time and win my first badge.

My Restaurant

This was the next one that seemed like a safe bet. I like cooking games, and restaurant games, and management sim games, so while I didn’t know which of those this would be, I figured it couldn’t be too bad. It was a pretty simple management game, where you took orders from customers and served them with fairly few clicks, mostly just a bunch of running around and waiting. It was easy to automate the gameplay with staff, so it basically just became an idle game really fast. The challenge in this game was clear and in the corner of the screen the whole time: serve 100 customers. It took some time, but it was easy enough to complete. I don’t think I’ll come back to My Restaurant, but it wasn’t terrible.

Bike of Hell (DNF)

This is an “obby” type game, basically an obstacle course that tests your ability to handle the Roblox physics engine while jumping around. I am very bad at obbies. This was an obby in which you had to ride a bike to the end of the bicycle-based obstacle course, so that meant dealing with Roblox physics at high speed with less control of your avatar. I fell off the track immediately and did not want to try again. It probably wouldn’t have been that bad if I liked obbies – the challenge was in the form of a special race that had a 50% chance of happening when you attempted the obby, as far as I could tell. I did not want to attempt it more than once, so this was the first I did not finish.

Brookhaven

There are a lot of generic roleplay games in this event. I usually stay away from these, as they are full of children playing house, and while I don’t have a problem with that, I am an adult who does not wish to play house with random children, or observe them doing so. This one seems to be the most popular on Roblox, so I decided to try it first. The first time I tried this one, I couldn’t figure out how to activate the event challenge, so I ran around aimlessly for a minute and then left. When I started writing this article, I decided to try again, so I logged back in, figured out how to activate the egg hunt event (I had to click a sign I didn’t realize I needed to click), and…immediately got run over by a car and shot at with semi-realistic guns. Cool!

The egg hunt itself was easy enough – it was just running around in a central area of the map walking into some large obviously-placed eggs. It was interesting walking around the game map and trying to imagine what kind of things kids would roleplay here. The design of the world is pretty simplistic and stylized in a very Roblox-feeling way, and the whole thing feels more like a bunch of toy playsets shoved together, every building being a place to tell a story in. It’s cute. Oh hey, did you know this game has real life toys sold at Target? Some of these games are so popular they have merchandise that I’ve seen in real life before ever playing the game or even playing Roblox. It’s weird.

Berry Avenue

This was another one of those generic roleplay worlds. It was much quieter, calmer, more pastel. Much, much more feminine than the relatively neutral toy-like atmosphere of Brookhaven. The feeling was bizarrely nostalgic. I didn’t have time to waste, though, and immediately talked to the helpfully-placed NPC that I was told upon starting the game would begin the quest I needed. I had to run around to some places on the map to make some kind of fruit bowl. I wasn’t completely paying attention. The map was very, very detailed and honestly really cute, with parodies of real-world stores. The grocery store the quest required me to go to was a clear parody of Whole Foods, so that shows what the usual demographic of this game is pretty clearly. I had to pick a house and a plot to put down to complete the quest, and it took me a bit to figure out a couple of the steps, but it was easy overall and didn’t take that much time or grinding. Yay.

I do have one interesting note about this game, though. Throughout the quest, I kept being told that this was “brought to you by e.l.f. UP!”. e.l.f…like the makeup brand? I looked up the phrase, and yep, it’s, the makeup brand. There’s apparently another Roblox game made by the company (there are a lot of advertisers making Roblox games) and they…sponsored this quest in The Hunt, I guess? I have no idea. What bizarre transaction took place to make all of this happen? It’s a mystery to me. I got my badge, so I’m done here.

PLS DONATE (DNF)

This is a very popular game because it heavily involves Robux, the treasured premium currency of Roblox. The point of the game is…you set up a booth, and beg for people to donate Robux to you. For whatever reason, people do actually seem to donate to the random strangers in this game. I don’t know if it actually transfers the currency to the other player or if it all just disappears into the game owner’s pockets, or what. I’m gonna be honest, I’m not doing that much research for this article. All I can say is that I have no interest in playing this outside of this event, and I couldn’t even figure out how to do the challenge for the event badge in this game. I learned from a friend (who had to look it up independently) that the challenge is also very long and very boring. Not going back to this one. I should note that I left this game pretty quickly, because after walking around trying to find out how to do the event challenge, a random person came up to me to directly beg me for Robux, and it freaked me out so much I instantly exited the game. No thanks!

Pull a Sword

At this point I was just entering whatever game was directly in front of me in the hub world, and this one was up next. It was instantly overwhelming, and accosted me from all sides with bright, flashy UI begging me to spend money and spin wheels and above all, DON’T LEAVE THE GAME. Literally, it said that in multiple places, as part of some a reward system where the amount of time you spent with the game open got you little prizes. The area dedicated to The Hunt was easy to access and self-contained, so I didn’t need to know what the game was about or like to start my quest for my badge. It was a sort of idle game, where you “train” to get “strength” to pull flashy swords out of stones. On a base level it functioned like a regular old clicker game, albeit very simple. I was able to idle most of the way to get to the point I could pull the sword which would give me the badge. Still, I couldn’t get past the loudness of the visuals. Every bit of the UI was screaming with notifications and barely any of it had any kind of description. The flashing and motion of the notifications was beginning to make me feel physically ill. There was some kind of pet system where if you equipped pets they would multiply your strength gain. I somehow acquired a pet that was a Goku parody. I don’t remember how I got him. Mercifully there was a button to hide most of the loud UI, but that also hid some functions required to easily play the game. Once I had my badge, I was out of there as fast as possible before the animations and timers made me feel any more sick.

Lumber Tycoon 2 (DNF)

I like “tycoon” games. Roller Coaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, you know those. Roblox “tycoons” are a totally different beast. They take away all the creativity of a classic park builder or manager role, and distill the game down to a plain old “numbers go up” simulator (not even to get into whatever Roblox calls a “simulator” game). Despite this, I still kind of like them. Like a lot of Roblox games, they’re just glorified incremental games, and I do love myself some incremental games. I have many, many hours in your Cookie Clickers and Adventure Capitalists and whatnot. My slight fondness for Roblox tycoons led me to enter this game, and…it was incomprehensible. I could not even figure out how to start the gameplay loop, let alone begin the badge challenge. I did not have time for this, so I just left. No lumber for me.

Pet Simulator 99

This one is one of those that I’ve seen real life merchandise of before I ever played the game itself. Well, I guess it was for an earlier game in the series, since I guess this is a series, though there aren’t 98 others. Whatever the case, it’s really popular and well merchandised. It looks cute, with little cube animals. It’s easy to start, and I was informed upon entering the game that if I reached Area 11, I would get my badge. Seemed easy enough. So I played the game. It’s a semi-idle game that has you taking your army of pets through different areas of destructible piles of coins and diamonds and other containers of currency. It’s very flashy and feels very Roblox-y, but not as sickeningly overwhelming and stressful as Pull a Sword. I dare say this was almost fun. Addicting, at the very least. The gameplay loop is very simple, but has just enough breaks from being a completely mindless idle game that it pulls me back in when I’m getting bored. What can I say, I like cute critters and watching boxes of coins explode and make numbers go up. This is a game I could get sucked into and lose track of time in…and I did. I ended up playing well into Area 16 before I realized…wait. I didn’t get the badge. I left the game and cut myself off there, assuming the badge was bugged and that the game was a loss. My friend also had a similar problem, but said another friend got the badge. Mysterious.

I logged in the next day, thinking since I was writing this article I’d try one more time to see if they fixed the bug. I loaded in and…the screen told me I needed to reach Area 20 to get the badge. Huh? I swear it was 11 before. Maybe that was the bug, then. Or maybe I just had a bad memory and left the game too early. Either way, I actually did get my badge by reaching Area 20, and by that point I was thoroughly done with the game, so that was that.

Creatures of Sonaria

This is the one on this list that I have definitely played the most. I genuinely really enjoy this game. I have been playing it a lot recently, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve been playing enough Roblox to care about The Hunt in the first place. You see, Roblox has a thriving community of kids who like to roleplay as animals. I was one of those kids back in my day, but I didn’t have Roblox. Kids these days have so many games where you can play as varyingly-quality 3D creatures and have fights and friends and whatnot. Creatures of Sonaria is a particularly well-made one. They’re all made up creatures, many referencing actual mythology, but they’re all their own original designs in their own original world. There’s some lore, but mostly I just play it to run around as a ton of different beautifully modeled and animated creatures. There are survival aspects too, where you have to find food and water and fight back against people trying to kill you. And boy, do people try to kill you. In any of these games that has mechanical combat, there are many, many children that want to murder everything they see. Communities even have a name for them: KOS, or “kill on sight”-ers. They don’t bother me, aside from being annoying sometimes. Godspeed, little violent animal children.

…Oh, right, there was a badge for this, huh. As part of an event. Yeah, I got that. You have to do a series of quests in game for the badge, and it’s all just normal gameplay, just challenging enough for a brand new player, but very routine for anyone who normally plays the game. It’s neat! There are also other, further challenges in the game for their own Easter event, some of which are very challenging indeed. I’m biased, but I like this game! Now I have to play some more games I probably won’t like so I can write about them. I’ll come back for you, my little Minawii.

My Hello Kitty Cafe (DNF)

This was the very first game I saw when I loaded into the hub world on this second day (the day of my writing this, but not the first day of me playing this event) to pick something new to play, and it looked cute, so I went in. My suspicions were correct: it was very cute. How can you go wrong with Hello Kitty? I did a little tutorial just because I like to get the feel for these games, and it went fine, but…I could not for the life of me figure out where to go to start the quest or whatever for the Hunt badge. I ran around both main areas and couldn’t find any trace of it, just the Hello Kitty anniversary celebrations that the game was understandably prioritizing. It’s weird that so many of these games that must have gone through some kind of vetting process to be part of this event just…don’t make it clear how to participate in the event through their game. Oh well. Interesting note about this game, at least: it was the first time I actually saw people typing in Japanese in the chat in Roblox. Neat.

Natural Disaster Survival

I know this game is an actual classic Roblox game that has survived through the years. I think I must have played this game very early on when I first tried Roblox, and it hasn’t changed much since I first played it, albeit with a nicer-looking end-of-round popup and a little bit of info for new players spawning in. The quest in this one is to collect some clocks for an NPC in the spawn area, and the clocks are scattered in each round of the aforementioned disaster-surviving. I don’t know how many are in each round – I’m going to guess three, since the NPC asks for three, but according to a player, one person can only pick up one at a time. The clocks are in semi-hidden locations, and can only be picked up by one person – once it’s been picked up, it’s gone for the round. Thankfully it’s not that difficult to find a clock, and the rounds go by pretty quick. It’s a neat little way to get people to actually play the game, I suppose, even if it is pretty annoying having to compete with people for the clocks. I think I would hate it more if the game weren’t so amusing. It’s a classic for a reason.

Strongman Simulator (DNF)

Ah, Roblox “simulator” games. I still don’t exactly know what they entail. They cover all sorts of different things, but as usual, most are of the “number go up” sort. This one had some pretty confusing gameplay, having you drag some items across a finish line to get “stronger” and then…lifting weights to accomplish…something? Either way, that wasn’t part of The Hunt at all. I looked around and it turned out the challenge for that was to drag an egg around a little obstacle course. Easy, right? Nope. The rope the egg was being dragged around on was long and impossible to control with Roblox hell physics, so it kept getting stuck and sliding directly into obstacles. Also, the music in the maze was truly obnoxious, in a “trying too hard to be funny” way. I was not going to withstand that for however many tries it would take me to get that egg to the end, so I tapped out pretty quick.

Tsunami Game

This was a weird game. Figuring out how any of it worked required a lot of trial and error, and trying to figure out exactly how to get the badge even moreso. The game takes place in a long box, and periodically large waves are generated and hit any player in their path. The waves are activated by a button at the starting area, and players can press it. I assume the waves are larger the longer the button goes without being pressed. This seemed like an interesting game mechanic, up until someone in chat mentioned that this was just a clone/ripoff of an older Roblox game, and then I interacted with an object that also implied this game was a reference to Squid Game, which is another thing altogether. The Hunt part of this game involved finding an alien of some sort, and nobody in the server could figure out where it was or how to find it. I thought that was the end, and then my game disconnected while I was trying to type this. I was about to exit, but I decided to reconnect anyway, and ended up in a new server with people who, somehow, had figured out how to find the alien. I don’t know what they did, but there was an area open in this server that hadn’t been in the other one, and after a whole lot of walking, I found the alien. It was extremely anticlimactic and honestly I shouldn’t have wasted my time, but hey, I got a badge for my trouble.

Categories: gaming

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