Ten years after witnessing her older sister's brutal murder, Jenny Traylor leaves her hometown in North Carolina to start her freshman year at the University of New York City. Still traumatized by her sister's death and struggling with crippling agoraphobia, Jenny tries to cope with the overwhelming city and figure out her new life. When Jenny's over-enthusiastic Resident Advisor organizes a Welcome Week scavenger hunt, Jenny is reluctantly persuaded to join the game. But as she and her new friends decipher the cryptic clues texted to their cell phones - clues that lead them through darker and increasingly remote parts of the city - it becomes terrifyingly clear how high the stakes have become. Someone is hunting for real.

Just before bounty hunter Charile triggers his gun to destroy the last two Critter-eggs, he gets a message that it would be illegal to extinguish the race from the galaxy. He's sent a transporter where he puts the eggs - unfortunately the transporter takes him with it and then gets lost in space. After 53 deep-frozen years, he's found by a private wreckage collector team under the unscrupulous Rick. On behalf of the mighty company Terracor they bring him to an empty space station - but Rick is curious and opens the box... so Charlie has work again, to keep the Critters from eating everybody.

In what appears to be a cross between Critters and The Towering Inferno, the residents of a shoddy L.A. apartment block are chased up to the roof by hoards of the eponymous hairy horrors.

A batch of unhatched critter eggs are mistaken for Easter eggs by the country-folk inhabitants of Grover's Bend and, before long, the ferocious furballs are on the rampage again.

In a future in which most water has disappeared from the Earth, we find a group of children, mostly teenagers...