Wordle hint and answer #608: Friday, February 17

Win today’s Wordle (opens in new tab) your way with our convenient range of hints and tips. If you’d like a little help with the February 17 (608) challenge, then today’s clue will point you in the right direction, and if you’d like a lot of help right now, then don’t worry because today’s answer is only a quick click away.

The yellows stuck around for far too long today, and when they did turn green, they were in exactly the sort of places I didn’t expect them to sit, so they weren’t half as helpful as I needed them to be. I did find the answer, but only on the very last go. Here’s hoping tomorrow’s Wordle isn’t quite so stressful.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Friday, February 17

Today’s answer is a hidden place, often in the ground, used to store essential or valuable items—food and general supplies, for example. It’s also a type of temporary load-improving storage used by web browsers and other programs that you may need to clear from time to time. 

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

Yes, a letter is used twice in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you’ve got the basics, it’s much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there’s nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

  • A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
  • Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
  • Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There’s no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don’t need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you’re coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today’s Wordle answer

(Image credit: Josh Wardle)

What is the Wordle 608 answer?

Let’s keep your win streak going. The answer to the February 17 (608) Wordle is CACHE.

Previous answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today’s Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

  • February 16: MAGIC
  • February 15: SALSA
  • February 14: SOUND
  • February 13: USAGE
  • February 12: GIANT
  • February 11: DEBUG
  • February 10: HEADY
  • February 9: STAGE
  • February 8: FLAIL
  • February 7: APPLE

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you’ll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word (opens in new tab) like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You’ll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you’re wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you’ll see which ones you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips (opens in new tab), and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle (opens in new tab), as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle (opens in new tab), refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures (opens in new tab). Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 


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Here’s a thoroughly Slavic cyberpunk stealth-action game

Indie studio Red Square Games just announced SlavicPunk: Oldtimer, an isometric shooter/hacker/sneaker based on the fiction of Polish author Michał Gołkowski. You play a private detective with a whole lot of issues and an intimidating sitcom dad moustache who goes up against the usual assortment of gangs and corrupt corporate executives.

SlavicPunk: Oldtimer promises “solid combat and movement systems, as well as a modular weapon upgrade system”. Stealth is definitely an option, though maybe not non-lethal stealth given all the people who get shot or stabbed in the back during the trailer. As well as an assortment of guns and cybernetic upgrades, it’ll have “Battlehacking”, which the developers describe as “our own hi-tech spellcasting system”.

Between dangerous areas that players will need to sneak and/or shoot their way through will be moments of peace where you get to explore the city, finding sidequests and pushing along the plot, which involves stolen data and the corporation responsible for ruining your city.

That sounds like a pretty generic story, but what’s promising is that alongside the usual imagery of dystopian streets with flying cars and hologram strippers are more culturally specific elements, like the sign depicting a neon girl who wears an ushanka and does goose steps instead of high kicks. It reminds me of Peripeteia only isometric, and you’re playing the grizzliest man who ever lived rather than Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell.

Red Square says the developers began by asking themselves, “what was the world going to look like in a couple of decades?  How would a hypothetical Central and Eastern European city and its inhabitants differ from, say, Blade Runner’s L.A. or Akira’s Neo Tokyo?’.

“The attempts to answer this puzzle has had a tremendous deal of influence upon the game’s artistic choices, including a mix of futuristic-esque and overly outdated technologies, the grim, brutalist architecture typical of the post-communist countries, the character’s not-so-obvious moral choices and the often crudely makeshift, yank-and-tuck character and atmosphere of an environment overpacked with people forced to cope with the uneven distribution of goods and wealth, often relying on their wits and sheer luck to make it to the next paycheck without losing their minds.”

Red Square is also working on a tabletop RPG in the same setting, called SibirPunk, which it plans to crowdfund via the Kickstarter-but-only-for-games platform Gamefound (opens in new tab). SlavicPunk: Oldtimer is scheduled for release in the second quarter of 2023 via Steam (opens in new tab).


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This solo-developed ‘cross between Dark Alliance and Dark Souls’ is shaping up to be my next RPG obsession


Mortal Crux (opens in new tab) is one of those independent projects that’s slowly assembling itself in front of our very eyes on Twitter and TikTok. We last checked in (opens in new tab) on this solo-developed action RPG last February when it was only a few months into development, but since that time it’s been accumulating a laundry list of interesting features for its frigid fantasy, all demoed for an eager audience on social media.

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At a glance, Mortal Crux is an isometric, one to four player action-RPG that looks to combine a Soulsy positioning and timing-based combat system with the fantasy vibe of classic CRPGs or their console cousins like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. Solo developer Jesse Walker has been drip feeding short video updates of new features and areas as he creates them, and I keep getting blown away by Mortal Crux’s intricate, fixed-camera interiors and playful approach to RPG design.





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The trailer for the upcoming Tetris movie is way hotter than it should be

“Sexy” is probably not a word most people would immediately reach for when describing the videogame Tetris, and yet the first trailer for the new Tetris film coming to Apple TV makes it look downright hot.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Tetris. Developed by engineer Alexey Pajitnov, it was originally released in the Soviet Union in 1984 and made its way to the West a few years later. That was a big deal in itself: At that point in history the USSR was still largely closed to the Western world. But once it went wide, it was a massive hit on just about every platform you can name, and it remains one of the best selling videogames of all time.

But it was also very staid. Colorful tetrominoes (that’s what the little Tetris blocks are called) drop from the top of the screen, you arrange them into complete lines, the lines disappear, continue ad infinitum. Clever and catchy as hell, yes, but Grand Theft Auto 5 it is not.

Which is what makes the trailer for the Tetris film headed to Apple TV in March so interesting. It starts as a predictable paean to Pajitnov’s creation, complete with a look at the game in its original monochromatic form and star Taron Egerton singing its praises: “It’s poetry. Art and math all working in magical synchronicity. It’s… it’s the perfect game.”

But then it takes a weird shift. Out of nowhere, a prototype Gameboy appears, which launches Egerton on a trip to the Soviet Union—not the friendliest place in the world to fast-talking Americans looking to make a buck. In short order he ends up dealing with various apparatchik functionaries, Mikhail Gorbachev, and some happily-violent gangsters, none of whom are very eager to let the golden goose slip away without claiming their share of the eggs.

It’s no doubt heavily fictionalized (for one thing, Egerton’s character in the film, Henk Rogers, is described as an “American videogame salesman,” but he’s actually Dutch), but there’s a kernel of truth to it. The battle for the Western rights to Tetris on various platforms was incredibly convoluted, and much of it took place without the knowledge of Elorg, the Soviet agency that controlled software imports and exports, and thus should have had final say on the matter. The whole thing eventually filtered down to a legal battle between Atari and Nintendo which Nintendo ultimately won, and thus was the world of videogames changed forever.

So did the creator of Tetris ever blast a classic Lada Signet down busy Moscow streets with the KGB in hot pursuit while keyboard-driven hair metal blared in the background? I don’t know, and frankly I don’t expect this movie will accurately fill us in on that particular point. But that’s okay, because it looks like a lot of fun—and we know that when all is said and done, it’s a happy ending for everyone.

Tetris is set to debut on Apple TV+ (opens in new tab) on March 31.


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Ubisoft has an ‘improved version’ of Skull and Bones that it hasn’t shown anyone yet

It has not been smooth sailing for Skull and Bones (opens in new tab), Ubisoft’s oft-delayed and much-derided game of high seas piracy that, for those keeping score, still doesn’t have a release date. It’s fair to say that what little we’ve seen of the game so far hasn’t made a great impression, but chief financial officer Frederick Duguet thinks that will change once we all get a look at an “improved version” of the game that, for now, remains behind closed doors.

Skull and Bones came up during the Q&A portion of Ubisoft’s quarterly financial call, when an investment analyst asked about projected sales required in order for the game to turn a profit after such a prolonged period of development. What made the question stand out was a comment at the end, which isn’t the sort of thing often heard during resolutely polite financial calls: “I’m asking because I’ve seen the reviews and they don’t look particularly strong.”

It’s not clear what “reviews” the caller was referring to, because Skull and Bones obviously hasn’t been reviewed yet. Some playtesters have reportedly not been impressed with what they’ve seen of the game, and while we’re not among them (which is to say, we haven’t had the opportunity to get our hands on it yet), neither the initial gameplay reveal (opens in new tab) in 2022 nor a January dev stream (opens in new tab) showing off new “narrative gameplay” knocked my socks off.

Regardless of the specifics, though, there’s no arguing that the overall response to the game so far has not been wildly positive. But Duguet thinks that minds will change once we see the as-yet unrevealed improvements developers have made to the game.

“We said in January, we’ve been very happy with the playtest that we’ve seen in early January, so we have a very strong improved version to show to players that they haven’t seen yet,” Duguet said during the call. “So this is really what we are going to leverage in the next month to drive more momentum on the game.”

To be blunt, I think there’s a lot of optimism there. Skull and Bones really doesn’t look like a very interesting game to me: There are lots of menus, timers, and button-clicks, but I don’t see any way to just go out and get rowdy with the boys, which is what the swashbuckling life is all about. Can that very fundamental aspect of gameplay be tweaked or tuned in a way that suddenly makes me stop thinking about Sea of Thieves—especially in such a short period of time?

I have my doubts, but hopefully we’ll get a better idea about it soon. Ubisoft declined to comment further on what exactly it will “leverage in the next month,” as Duguet put it, but with luck it means those public playtests (opens in new tab) we’ve been waiting for will finally start to happen—or at the very least, that playtesters will be able to start properly sharing their experiences with the game.

Unfortunately, today’s call did not give us any kind of launch date news: The most recent delay, announced in January, pushed the game into Ubisoft’s 2023-24 fiscal year, which means it will be out sometime after April 1.


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Bungie is going to sell a ‘booster’ that unlocks the new Destiny 2: Lightfall subclass on your alt


Zavala and friends staring at their bank balances after blowing their glimmer on a booster again. (Image credit: Bungie)
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When Bungie added the Stasis subclass to Destiny in the Beyond Light expansion, one of the chief pieces of negative feedback was that it was too grindy to unlock on your alts. Having acquired the new power on your main character by finishing the Beyond Light campaign, you also had to repeat the entire process on your other toons, including a lengthy time-gated questline. 

I recently asked Bungie if the process would be less painful when it comes to Strand, the new subclass being added in Lightfall, and this was the answer from design lead Kevin Yanes: “The friction [in Beyond Light] was way too high, especially for newer players who were coming in and just wanted to see the new stuff.” Yanes also said that although players will still need to complete the Lightfall campaign on each character to unlock Strand, the subclass would be much more complete at that point than Stasis was.



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Resident Evil 4 Remake system requirements are pleasantly mild

Resident Evil 4 Remake promises to surprise us with its modern survival horror reimagining of the Capcom classic. The PC system requirements, however, offer no surprises: they’re exactly the same as 2021’s Resident Evil Village, promising solid fps at 1080p on modest hardware. 

The RE4 system requirements were announced last year, but we’re sizing them up now since the game’s launch date is just around the corner: March 24. Capcom’s RE Engine continues to impress with how good it looks and how well it runs on affordable gaming rigs (opens in new tab). When it launches, Capcom says that Resident Evil 4 Remake will only require an AMD Radeon RX 560 or an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 paired with a processor from the last five years to hit 60 fps at 1080p on its “prioritize performance” graphics setting. And for 60 fps, the developer says you’ll need to have at least an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with a slightly more recent CPU.

Barring any unexpected performance issues at launch, if you meet those requirements and have at least 8GB of RAM (16 GB to hit the recommended specs) and Windows 10 or 11, you should be in a good position to play the long-awaited remake. This also means that the game should run pretty well on the Steam Deck if you knock some of the graphics settings down and aim for 30 to 45 fps.

If you want a ray-traced rural Spanish town from the start, Capcom says you’ll need at least an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, which, again, isn’t a steep requirement these days.

Here are the minimum and recommended system requirements: 

Minimum (60 fps, 1080p, “Prioritize Performance”) 

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-7500
  • RAM: 8 GB RAM
  • GPU: AMD Radeon RX 560 with 4GB VRAM or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 for ray tracing) 
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i7 8700 
  • RAM: 16 GB RAM
  • GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5700 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 for ray tracing)  

The Steam page (opens in new tab) doesn’t list how much storage space you’ll need, but I’d expect it to be around 40 to 50 GBs, similar to the Resident Evil 3 remake and Village.

Much of Resident Evil 4 Remake remains a secret. Capcom has hinted at some significant changes, including giving Leon the ability to crouch for stealth, better AI for Ashley, the removal of QTEs, new enemy types, and new sidequests. It said it was keeping the dreaded island section of the game, but I suspect it’s been reworked to be less action-focused.


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Wait, there are 5 Lord of the Rings games due in the next 2 years?

In August 2022, Embracer Group added Middle-earth Enterprises to its ever-growing lineup of studios and properties. And it’s not wasting any time doing something with it: Embracer revealed in its Q3 2022 financial report that it now has no less than five LotR games in development.

“There are currently five games in production by external partners, to be released in financial year 2023/24,” the report states. “There is also one film in production by an external partner.”

Embracer’s 2023/24 fiscal year runs from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024, meaning that, if the schedule holds, all five games will be out within little more than a year.

The report doesn’t give any indication of titles or platforms, but it’s possible that we know of at least three of the games in development already. Go (opens in new tab)llum and Return to Moria (opens in new tab) have been on our radar for a while, and the third potential project is The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth (opens in new tab), a mobile game being developed by Electronic Arts.

None of these games are being developed or published by an Embracer company—Gollum is Daedalic and Nacon, while Return to Moria is being developed by Free Range Games and published by North Beach Games—but as the unofficial fan account EmbracerInvestor (opens in new tab) noted, the likelihood is that all of these games were licensed out by Middle-earth Enterprises prior to its acquisition by Embracer. Generally, those pre-existing deals hold up even after an acquisition: That’s why, for instance, 2K Games is publishing Gearbox’s new Tales From the Borderlands game, even though Gearbox is now owned by Embracer (opens in new tab).

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The Lord of the Rings: Gollum doesn’t currently have a release date: It was supposed to be out last fall but a July 2022 delay pushed it into 2023, and at last check it was expected to be out sometime during the first half of Nacon’s 2023-24 fiscal year (opens in new tab), putting it between April 1 and September 30. Return to Moria is possibly a little closer, as it’s slated to arrive sometime this spring (opens in new tab).

I’ve reached out to Embracer for more information on its Lord of the Rings plans and will update if I receive a reply.



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The best superhero game in recent memory is free on Steam this weekend

Marvel’s Midnight Suns was our runner-up for 2022 Game of the Year, but despite all the praise that’s been dealt to Firaxis’ superhero RPG, it was out-earned on Steam by another Firaxis game last year, the six-year-old Civilization 6. Midnight Suns did at least crack Steam’s 2022 top sellers list for new releases (opens in new tab), but not by much. Maybe it’s one of those games that starts slow and picks up momentum as word spreads: Not everyone seems to be aware that it’s not just a good tactical combat game, but also a good tactical befriending superheroes game—Marvel Mass Effect, more or less.

If awareness is really its problem, Midnight Suns could see a boost this weekend: It’s currently 40% off on Steam (opens in new tab), making the Legendary Edition $60 and the standard edition $36, and also free to play until Sunday at 10 am Pacific. Should you buy the game on Steam after the free trial ends, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off.

Take-Two has also announced a date for the next Midnight Suns DLC drop. With the base game, you can fight and chill with 12 heroes, including Blade, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, and Nico Minoru, and new heroes are now being added in $15 DLC packs. Deadpool was introduced in January in “The Good, the Bad, and the Undead,” and this month Venom is joining the crew in “Redemption.”

Venom already appears early on in Midnight Suns as an antagonist, and Redemption will see the symbiote join the group “to right the wrongs he committed” while under the influence of the game’s head baddie, Lilith. Aside from the roster addition, Midnight Suns DLC packs also include a new upgrade for the Abbey (that’s your base where you hang out with your super pals, upgrade stuff, and prep for battle) and three new story missions. The Redemption missions will continue the story introduced by the Deadpool DLC, which added vampyres to the list of problems New York City is dealing with.

Redemption comes out on February 23, and will be available standalone or as part of the Season Pass, which includes all DLC and comes with the $100 Legendary Edition (which is $60 on sale right now). At least two more DLC heroes, Storm and Morbius, are coming.

Take-Two is pushing Midnight Suns pretty hard right now. Besides the Steam sale and free weekend, there are also trials available for all Xbox Series X/S owners and for PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers. Steam users get the better deal: Those console trials are limited to three and two hours respectively, but you can play the PC version as much as you want until the trial period ends Sunday morning. 

We called Midnight Suns a “brilliant superhero social sim” in our 88% review, so it’s worth the download in our view.


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12 tips for getting started in Wild Hearts

Just starting out in Wild Hearts (opens in new tab)? Koei Tecmo’s Monster Hunter-inspired action RPG can be a little forbidding at first, but there are key things every hunter should know before rushing into battle against the kemono. These basic tips will help you understand how combat in the game works, how best to use the game’s gadgets when navigating, and most importantly how to avoid dying too many times.

There are also Wild Hearts weapon tips if you haven’t settled on your main yet, as well as how to unlock new weapons.

Map your surroundings

The map in Wild Hearts is incredibly useful for strategising your hunts, and the way you can explore it in free roam means you can start building something of a resource and travel network almost immediately. The most important thing to do as a starter is unblock Dragon Pits, which are scattered across the map but also marked on it, and these pits will give you more energy to conjure karakuri such as the flying vines that let you whiz around the map, or the hunter’s towers that track kemono in the area. It’ll also let you create more bases and summon gadgets for forging and food production, like the drying rack and pickling jar.

Each pit provides a different amount of energy, and you need crystals to unblock and upgrade them. Crystals can be found out and about in the world, but keep a particular eye out for skeletons that have little butterflies scattering from them: These are the crystal motherlodes. One final tip: Once you’ve unblocked a Dragon Pit, you can upgrade it from the detailed map without having to go there.

Look for bargain tents

Each region in Wild Hearts will have one hidden area where building Dragon Karakuri is hugely reduced in price (you’ll be able to build a hunter’s tent for five earth energy rather than 50). The game is basically telling you to set up a camp at these spots. In Harugasumi Way, the second camp can be found in the far north of the map by the mountain shrine.

More generally, the reason you want as many hunter’s tents as you can get is that these are how to fast travel in Wild Hearts. Generally you’ll only be able to afford a couple of full price ones though, which is why the discount spots are so important to find. And if you’re running out of energy and can’t build the Dragon Karakuri you want, you can break down older ones from the map.

Hunting towers sync

A small tip but essential to know. The game introduces you early on to the hunting tower karakuri, which will help you find where large kemono are hanging out. These have a limited range but, crucially, activating one will activate all of them in a region. So when you’re up against an especially slippery kemono, having a network of 2-3 of these scattered around means you’re able to quickly find them every time they flee.

(Image credit: EA)

Enhance your tsukomo

While no Palico or Palamute, your little robot pal in Wild Hearts is still a valuable companion. Tsukomo can distract monsters, put down healing mist if you’re in trouble, and provide a variety of other support functions. If you build a campfire, you can enhance your tsukomo using old cogs and specialise them towards a specific role, such as attack, defense, assist, or threader (but you’ll end up  wanting to upgrade all of these stats over time). You can collect wild tsukumo around each map, which provide those old cogs you need for upgrades.

Unlocking new karakuri: Watch for the LB / L1 prompts

Wild Hearts has a system called ‘flash of inspiration’ that happens during fights, when basically a kemono will wind-up an attack and the game goes into slow-motion and prompts you to press the build button (LB / L1 if you’re on pad). Seize these opportunities and you’ll have a short QTE-like sequence where your hunter builds a new type of karakuri, which is then unlocked. Note that the flash of inspiration sometimes just doesn’t happen, but if you fight those monsters again it’ll usually work.

Other karakuri are unlocked by defeating kemono in the main questline, but flashes of inspiration also happen in optional sidequests. One important point is to check the karakuri tree after unlocking new ones, as these often allow you to use kemono orbs to unlock other options. You can get kemono orbs by slaying them, or by breaking their parts.

Don’t neglect basic karakuri in fights

One of the very first karakuri you’ll unlock is the spring, which might seem basic but has an absolutely killer hidden feature. Whack a few down when fighting a giant kemono in order to help you dodge attacks, and you’ll soon discover that the springing animation grants your hunter some invincibility frames (much like Monster Hunter’s ‘superman’ dive). This is an absolute game-changer and I now use springs constantly during hunts.

Crates are another starter karakuri that offer a tonne of value during a hunt. If you build three crates on top of each other, then jump on them, you can perform unique plunging attacks that are some of the most powerful in the game. The karakuri katana’s unbound aerial twist drop deals a nasty amount of damage, as does the karakuri’s staff plunging juggernaut blade.Wild Hearts

(Image credit: Koei Tecmo)

Don’t attack the glowing weak spots: Steal thread from them

As fights progress the kemono will acquire big glowing blue-green patches on their bodies. At first I assumed these were just weak spots, but in fact they’re resources and a way to stagger the beasts. The method will be different depending on the monster but you need to get some height, clamber on the thing’s body towards the weak spot, and use your interact button (Left trigger on controller by default) to activate your hunter’s arm. You’ll get a load of thread to build basic karakuri and the kemono don’t like it one bit—you have the potential to stagger them this way, too. 

There are also a number of weapon skills that tie directly into hunter’s arm, giving you increased attack or defence for a short period after successfully extracting thread.

Eat before fighting

Fairly simple: One of Wild Hearts’ core systems is eating food to grant various buffs, but it won’t let you chow down mid-battle. So when you’ve tracked down a kemono and are ready to get into the action, have something to eat beforehand. You can make food with stronger buffs by placing it on the drying rack, and that can be boosted even further once you unlock the pickling jar.

One nice difference between Wild Hearts and Monster Hunter: here the buffs from eating stay applied until you win a hunt, so dying or failing won’t empty your stomach.

Dying monsters are the deadliest monstersWild Hearts monsters.

(Image credit: Koei Tecmo)

A lot of Monster Hunter tips can be applied to Wild Hearts and work equally well, but this one is the real doozy. When a monster is nearly dead, they’ll become enraged and attack more aggressively. Unlike Monster Hunter, however, in Wild Hearts the beasts seem to spend a lot longer in this state, and their damage output absolutely goes through the roof.

So the most dangerous time in any Wild Hearts hunt is the last five minutes and, especially in co-op, this can be one of the more frustrating elements of the game. It’s incredibly annoying to whittle down a giant monster to 5% health then see your entire team get more-or-less one shot and have to start again.

How to avoid it? The only real advice is situational, because every monster’s final phase has a different pace and different style of attack. One major commonality however is their increased use of AoE attacks, big sweeps and slams that can hit multiple players at once, and their reduced cooldown times on regular attacks. Also, don’t expect your karakuri to be as effective: monsters can become more resistant to the stunning effects of karakuri like fireworks when enraged.

The best thing to do is to keep on the fringes of their reach and work out where your windows are for getting a few hits in: Spend one minute doing this for each beast, and you’ll spend a lot less time angry that you died to some bullshit tail sweep and had to start over.

Don’t button mash

Wild Hearts is a game that punishes button mashers, and the wind-ups on some of the weapons are so ludicrous that if you just whack away you’re going to be badly beaten by something much bigger than you. If you’re a masher by nature, like me, maybe think about focusing on the default katana, which does have some lengthier combos but won’t leave you anywhere as exposed as something like the maul.

Hit the tail

Yes, you can damage areas of monsters’ bodies, and you should. The most typical target is a tail but the reasons for doing it are twofold: It’ll reduce the kemono’s attacking abilities, and it’ll improve the rewards you get at the end. As with Monster Hunter, you can sever tails, or smash parts off of kemono. This will drop kemono orbs, and bits of the monster that you can harvest. The best way to do this is usually with powerful attacks such as the maul’s finisher, the nodachi’s fully charged strike, or the karakuri staff’s juggernaut blade.

Go home occasionally

Minato, the game’s hub, is easy to forget about. Wild Hearts encourages you to go out into the wilds and just take on hunt after hunt, but there are a range of sidequests available here that regularly update and can unlock various goodies. In your first 5-10 hours especially, go back to Minato after every few hunts and, at the very least, do the Guild of Fishermen quests that you can get from Nobimitsu at the wharf, which will unlock some useful hunting gear.


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