Hunter

Watch first, move second

The worst habit you can bring into Hunter is motion. New players start walking the moment a level loads, meet a vision cone mid-sweep, and restart without learning anything. Do the opposite: spend the first ten seconds standing still. Guards walk fixed routes and turn on a rhythm, so every room is a machine with a cycle, and once you have watched one full loop you know when each corridor opens and closes. The gap you are looking for is the moment a guard faces away from your path, or a cone swings behind a wall. Move on the gap, stop, and watch again. Stealth here is less about sneaking and more about scheduling.

The cone is the whole game

Every guard sees only inside a faint triangular cone pointing the way it faces. Outside that cone you are invisible, no matter how close you stand, which turns each level into a geometry problem. Reach a guard from any angle its cone does not cover and it is eliminated on the spot. The safest angle is directly behind, where the cone can never point, so the real skill is working your way around to a guard's back rather than approaching the front and hoping. Distance does not dull the cone either: deep inside it near the wide end you are just as seen as up close. Only angle and walls hide you. You move by tapping or clicking where you want to walk, or with WASD and the arrow keys. Prefer short hops to one long click, because a long walk commits you across open ground while the cones keep sweeping, and half the danger in this game is being mid-stride somewhere you chose four seconds ago.

Walls, and the half-second of grace

Cones are blocked by walls, exactly like real line of sight, so every corner casts a safe shadow you can hide in and move through. Use walls to cross a guard's field of view unseen and to break contact when a patrol turns your way. If you do slip, there is a small mercy: step into a cone while the guard is looking and a warning mark appears, and only after about half a second does it fire. That is just enough time to duck back behind cover if you react instantly. Treat it as a fire alarm, not a plan. Players who lean on the grace window die exactly half a second later than players who do not.

Pick your order

Rooms with several guards are sequencing puzzles. Suppose one guard patrols a corridor while a second stands still with its cone covering that same corridor. You cannot take the walker, because the watcher would see it happen. The move is to slip around behind the watcher first, through the shadow of a wall, and remove the eyes; the corridor then belongs to you, and the walker dies on schedule. As a rule, take the guard who watches the space you need before the guard who walks through it, and when two cones cover each other, wait for the point in the cycle when one of them turns away. That moment always exists. The designers put it there, and finding it is the level. It pays to plan the whole room before the first takedown, last guard first, because removing a guard changes nothing about the cones that remain.

Twelve rooms, and a long tradition

There are 12 levels, and the later ones layer in more guards and tighter routes until you are threading between overlapping sweeps one careful step at a time. Restarts are quick and rooms are short, so treat deaths as scouting: every failed run buys you a piece of the patrol map. The vision cone itself has a pedigree. Stealth games grew up with Metal Gear in 1987, and the cone became something players could actually see in the late 1990s, when games like Commandos and Metal Gear Solid drew each guard's sight on the map and let you plan around it. Hunter strips the idea to its bones, a dot, some walls, and triangles you must not touch, which is why it feels less like an action game and more like a puzzle where the pieces are looking for you.