How to pause the game in single player in Monster Hunter Rise

While playing Monster Hunter Rise, you’ll be spending quite a bit of time hunting down massive creatures and attempting to bring them down. These hunts can be long adventures, and you may want to pause in the middle of the game. You can pause the game while playing in the single-player mode. This guide covers how pausing works in single-player for Monster Hunter Rise on the Nintendo Switch and PC.

You won’t be able to do it by clicking on the start button or going into any menus. This is because the clock for your mission is still slowly trickling down and making its way to zero. Instead, what you need to do is hit the ‘home’ button on your Nintendo Switch. This is the one underneath the right joystick. Click this button, and you’ll drop out of your Monster Hunter Rise game to access your Switch menu.

You can also do this on the PC version of the game. However, you’ll need to click the Shift and Tab buttons to open up the Steam user interface to bring up the pause menu while playing the game. You’ll need to do this every time you want to pause the game from your PC.

From there, you can return your Monster Hunter Rise game, and you’ll see that there’s a new pause screen. The timer for your mission is not counting down, none of the monsters are running around in the game, and you can freely put the game down to do anything you want. Once you return to your Switch or PC, you can start the mission again and start playing. Nothing will have happened, so you can use this tactic right in the middle of a fight with any monster you’re hunting.

You can pause Monster Hunter Rise rise at any time. You have to make sure you click the Nintendo Switch ‘pause’ button or exit out of the Steam user interface.