Monster Hunter Wilds’ Seikret makes travelling easier than ever, but I had a much better time when I dared to explore the old fashioned way: On foot

Monster Hunter Wilds is the most seamless, sprawling open world Capcom has crafted for the series… not that you'd notice. The introduction of the Seikret—Wilds' trusty chocobo-adjacent mount—has been both a blessing and a curse during my 100 hours playtime.

Getting from camp to monster has never been so painless: Seikrets are speedy, never get lost (until they get stuck in the odd pathing loop), and even let you go totally hands-off if you don't feel like pushing an analog stick for two minutes—though I definitely recommend you tweak some of those Seikret settings to make the controls a little more direct. Hell, there's hardly a resource node I have to dismount to collect, either, with almost everything gatherable with a quick zap of my Hook Slinger or by grabbing it as my bird zooms close enough to a herb or honey hive.

But with great speed comes a stunning lack of spatial awareness. It means I'm often blitzing past Wilds' zones, barely taking any time to smell the roses—or inhale way too much sand dust, rather. It's a shame, too, because each distinct biome in Wilds is littered with gorgeous spots. There's the cascading waters of Scarlet Forest, the huge sand dunes of Windward Plains and the spitting, spluttering puddles of crude oil in Oilwell Basin. Gorgeous stuff that's mostly just a blur on my Seikret.

Monster Hunter Wilds is a game obsessed with moving you along: No investigating tracks like World, almost every monster is readily marked on the map even when they haven't been discovered yet, and most of the story is spent driving you from one hunt to another. The gameplay loop has been plucked and pruned like a 2000s eyebrow, going just a tad overboard with streamlining the whole process of prepping, tracking and eventually hunting my foe.

All of that means there's rarely a moment where you need to stop. It took me until I'd hunted almost every monster and completed every side quest to say to myself: "Hey, I could just get off this damn thing and travel the old fashioned way."

Was I making things more difficult for myself? Sure, I guess, but it was a chance to deliberately slow down and appreciate what the Forbidden Lands has to offer.

Unfortunately there's no way to straight-up stable your Seikret—it'll follow you around like a lost puppy wherever you go—but making the effort to hop off and have a wander around my environment did give me that little bit of longing for the more leisurely pace of Monster Hunter: World. I'm not looking to get lost in the Ancient Forest for 20 minutes and run around in circles trying to find some big old monster footprint. But to me, the lulls between hunts are just as important as the grand fights themselves. They're moments to take a step back: check my inventory, observe the endemic life, maybe even do a spot of fishing before taking my Hunting Horn to a Doshaguma skull.

Having my own two feet trekking along areas rather than scaly wyvern claws opened my eyes to the sheer scope of Wilds' world. It's not quite as densely decorated and node-filled as World—it's sort of like when MMOs add flying and need to artificially plump up a map's real estate so you're not bouncing off the invisible walls—but those giant sand pits look a whole lot bigger when it was just little old me sinking straight into 'em.

The biggest bummer is that I couldn't opt for doing this full-time. Ultimately my finger was constantly twitching over that d-pad, looking for the easier journey, and each area is scattered with Seikret-exclusive paths that require you to hop on your bird to reach otherwise inaccessible nooks. We'll always ultimately choose convenience when it's offered to us, but I think it's well worth taking five minutes every now and then to get your steps in and seek out the prettiest, quietest spots each biome has to offer.