Is Duck Season a game? Is a Hot Pocket a meal? Who needs labels anyway? Created by Stress Level Zero, developers of multiplayer shooter Hover Junkers (2016), Duck Season is something, that’s for sure. Part shooting game, part theater piece, part exploration experience, Duck Season defies the genre pigeonholing that would make this article easier to write.
Update: It was stated incorrectly in the article that Duck Season was a Vive exclusive. Stress Level Zero reached out to us to correct the statement by saying that it will be releasing on Steam for SteamVR-capable headsets, and not Vive alone. The studio maintains they aren’t “fans of exclusivity,” and that they believe “once you make a game you’re proud of you just want everyone to be able to play it.”
Hosted at Valve’s booth at this year’s GDC, I met studio co-founder Brandon Laatsch to show me Stress Level Zero’s latest development, something that initially surfaced two weeks ago without context on Laatsch’s YouTube channel featuring a weird dog mascot getting shot to death behind a house.
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I would later meet that weird dog-person as he fills the role of the hound from an uncomfortably realistic version of the Nintendo lightgun classic Duck Hunt (1984). The minigame, realized as an actual 3D duck shooting game, plays a central role in how the whole thing unfolds. Although there is a simple Duck Hunt-style game, there’s much more going than meets the eye. You certainly didn’t bet that the dog, who you invariably always took a shot at, would come back for revenge.
Playing the room-scale game on the HTC Vive, there’s a warm sense of familiarity sitting on the rug in front of the TV with the obligatory melange of lovingly worn game cartridges, VHS tapes, and gummy snacks strewn about. Picking up the Duck Season cartridge and placing it into my nondescript 8-bit home video game console (i.e. not Nintendo), I’m transported to a marshy world beyond the CRT’s screen and given a shotgun, plenty of ammo and a bunch of ducks to shoot.
The demo offered me a look into three different points in the game; my first encounter in the Duck Hunt minigame with pump shotgun and real ducks, a slightly harder level of the minigame, and a disturbing snap back to reality where the dog-person makes the jump from my imagination to the real world.
Laatsch told me the game has several different endings depending on what you do or how you anger the creepy dog mascot, which he says runs at about 90 minutes of gameplay once through. Endings range from “kind of good” to bad, he says—probably an understatement considering how creepy the deranged character comes off. Laatsch maintains that if you go back and explore each of the storylines, it could bring you to about 4 hours total of gameplay.
I couldn’t help but think of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things (2016) as I played through the demo given its otherworldy interludes and clear nostalgia for the past. Laatsch however maintains that development started before the series was released and draws on the same longing to recreate the atmosphere of the Steven Spielberg-esque ’80s films of his youth.
Duck Season is still in development, so there’s no hard release date yet.
