Watch 12 minutes of new Hunt: Showdown gameplay in the video up above, as the developers guide you through a match.

Banishing giant spiders and hulking pig men back to their respective circles of hell can be an absolute nightmare, let me tell you.

And it certainly isn’t helped when opposing hunting parties block your exit routes with barbed wire or lob flares in through the windows, making it impossible to see what you’re doing. That’s the thing about Hunt: Showdown. While ostensibly you’re tracking down and slaughtering hideous monsters, in truth, you’re the one that’s being hunted.

It isn’t easy to quickly relay what kind of game Hunt: Showdown is, since it doesn’t sit neatly into an existing pigeonhole. Hurried summations might evoke Day Z, PUBG, or even Friday 13th, and while it has elements you’d recognise from such shooters and survival games, it’s not quite like any of those. If you want to know more about how a match unfolds, you should definitely read Jon’s preview from E3. He does a fantastic job of outlining all the details and how it all works.

What I’m going to tell you about is how tense I felt creeping around the murky swamps of Louisiana, how a bungled ambush lost me an entire bounty, and how barbed wire grenades are an excellent invention for any budding monster hunter.

Be Very Quiet We’re Hunting Monsters

In my first ever match – I’m not going to lie – I wasn’t a very competent monster hunter; I was a bag of nerves and indecision. We’d failed to find all three clues that would reveal the location of the map’s target monster – in this case, a giant spider lurking in an old lumber mill – but luckily my partner heard shots coming from the East. We investigated, and keeping very quiet, we heard on the proximity voice chat other hunters inside. From all the gunfire, we slyly surmised they’d just taken down the boss, and lo and behold, the banishing process began. (Essentially, the hunters must send the creature back to hell in order to collect their reward, but once initiated this ritual reveals the location of the kill on the map, attracting every other hunter.)

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This process takes roughly a minute, after which the hunters, along with their bounty, hightail it to one of the extraction points located towards the fringes of the map.

Knowing they’d soon need to inch their way out, my partner and I set about making their exit as difficult as possible. We blocked the most obvious doorways with barbed wire grenades, which upon detonation unspools a violent tangle of metal. It’s such a fun and inventive tool to use. My partner also chucked in flares through open windows to blind the team inside and make it harder to take shots at us from within. We were all set to take them down, having rigged the battlefield to our advantage, though conscious that other hunters would soon be descending on our location. And then… well, then the team inside started a generator which turned on floodlights dotted around the building. The light was blinding for us camped in the darkness, and separated me from my fellow hunter. Our plan was suddenly in tatters; our advantage, lost.

Divide and Conquer and Panic

What ensued was fraught yet fun chaos. I got separated from my partner because of the shafts of light. I didn’t dare cross them, fearing I’d make an easy target of myself, but because of the distance I could no longer hear my partner on chat. I heard gunfire, took a risk, dashed in the direction of the shots, and saw two hunters slowly creeping up on my partner. I unloaded my shotgun in to the back of one, while the other brought down my partner. He’d obviously not realised I’d killed his mate, and was creeping up behind him. The shot was lined up, and… click. Click.

(I’d forgotten to reload, and there’s no auto-reload to excuse the careless.)

He heard it, but still had one in the chamber; he turned around and killed me. With my partner down, death embraced us. Permadeath is brutal, but it’s fundamental to ensuring each match I played was brimming with tension and pressure.

Things that Go Bump in the Night

It does this in other more innovative ways too. One of the most brilliant tricks Hunt: Showdown brings to the table is how the environment can both help and hinder you in these situations. As you walk around you’ll see dogs in cages, chains hanging from the rafters in a barn, broken shards of glass cluttering up the floor – all serve the purposes of revealing your location or that of other hunters. Say you just passed one of the kennels, and went inside the closest house, but hear the barking of the dogs. If you’re partner is right by your side, that means someone is outside. Although, it’s possible they may have avoided the dogs entirely, and are lining you up in their sights. You can never let down your guard.

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Even though the map is roughly only a kilometer squared, each match felt fresh due to the sheer number of variables at work. You can choose to find all the clues or camp in the centre of the map, waiting for another team to do all of the work; you can kill another team of hunters but still find yourself devoured by a pack of demonic mutts on your way to an extraction point; you can split up with your partner, choosing to camp two different extraction points, playing the game like a vulture. There are so many ways for matches to unfold and varying tactics to employ. You may perfectly execute a hunt and evac over the course of 40 nail-biting minutes or die in an instant to a hobbling zombie next to your spawn point.

No match played out the same and because you’re never informed of how many other hunters are currently alive, the pressure never eases. If you’re playing Hunt: Showdown, you’re always looking over your shoulder.

Stay on IGN as we'll have more information about Hunt: Showdown this Thursday as part of this month's IGN First coverage.

Daniel is IGN's UK Managing Editor. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter