Fear & Hunger (2018)

Fear and Hunger is probably the most interesting game I’ve played in the past five years. Despite its simple engine and amateur design, it all comes together in a way that elevates its quality far, far above the level of any of its individual aspects. There’s a lot to talk about, so this is probably gonna be a long one.

Built in RPG Maker, with a very traditional top-down look that evokes SNES era JRPGs, F&H is often referred to as an RPG, which is certainly true. But in terms of the most accurate genres arranged in order of significance, I’d call it an Immersive Sim first, Survival Horror second, and RPG last. It utilizes a recognizable turn-based, party-based RPG combat system, but that system is only a small piece of the overall landscape of gameplay, one that should be avoided as much as possible by a savvy player. The game’s mechanics empower the player to achieve success through a wildly diverse set of methods, while also being gruelingly punishing enough that you will always feel like you’re on the brink of disaster and need to reach for every possible advantage. In addition to the mechanics, the game has an excellent sense of atmosphere, compelling lore, and the kind of vague-yet-intriguing cast that give rise to extremely invested fan content seeking to flesh them out into fully realized characters. While excelling at many aspects, I also don’t have any major criticisms that aren’t countered by the way the shortcomings are made up for and sometimes incorporated into what makes this game special. So in the spirit of comprehension, I’ll try and separate this out into actual categories instead of just spewing it out stream-of-conscious style.

Premise Upon choosing from one of four characters—which entails going through a quick backstory allowing you to make several hard choices that go on to determine your starting build, a highly engaging method of character customization—you are dropped immediately in front of the entrance to the eldritch labyrinth that is the Dungeon of Fear and Hunger.

The premise is simple, with each of your characters having their own specific reasons to delve into the dungeon and seek Le’garde, a mercenary captain who has shattered the political status quo of F&H’s world and been condemned in turn. RPG terminology aside, the Dungeon is an actual dungeon, filled with prisoners and jailers, mostly reserved for political enemies of the state. But the unholy influence that seeps up from beneath the dungeon has transformed prisoners, jailers, and visitors alike into horrible, inhuman monstrosities, making even a single prison guard or pair of watch dogs into a potentially game ending threat.

Exploration

At first you are completely alone, which means that you are pretty likely to get completely destroyed by the first enemy you encounter. You stand almost no chance against any competent foe until you’ve acquired some decent equipment and allies, unless you’re playing as the Knight character who starts out strong enough and with some very powerful skills to give her an edge in battle. Even so, winning will likely be costly. As you explore the dungeon you’ll come across other characters you can recruit, most notably the other 3 potential player characters, along with a few others. Gaining a full party makes a massive difference in survival, allowing you to push further into the dungeon. Whether or not you succeed at your initial goal of finding Le’garde, the game truly opens up beyond that point, leading to a vast and complex lower area with various paths and objectives you can take leading to one of the games many endings.

Along the way you’ll have to manage your party’s health, mind, and hunger, all of which have the potential to ruin you and which are affected by a wide variety of aspects in the setting: darkness, time, combat, phobias, and special scripted events, some of them random. The very layout of the dungeon is uncooperative. Though the dungeon has a specific layout in order of unique areas which always contain specific features, the individual areas can be swapped out from a variety of premade designs, giving it a pseudo roguelike feel. In addition the items you find in 95% of places are highly randomized, meaning that if you have to reload a save and retrace your steps you’re likely to wind up with a completely different set of loot than you would otherwise, which can completely change your playstyle from that point on.

The ubiquitous act of saving and loading is given a lot more weight in F&H than in most games. You can save by resting at infrequent beds, which notably do NOT restore any of your health or mind. But saving is risky. Attempt it, and you’ll be prompted with a coin flip, a mechanic that is used for many aspects of F&H, including combat and searching chests and bookshelves, which contain the games best equipment. You can stack the flip in your favor with a rare item, but either way you have a chance of failure, which means that you will be interrupted by an enemy, leading to a dangerous encounter… and losing the option to save. Beds have limited use as well. This system leads to a gameplay loop in which you’ll want to explore as much as possible and push as hard as you can before saving, and then using the knowledge you gain through exploration to assist in your next attempt if you die and have to reload. If you wind up in a very bad situation, with your party half dead and your limbs cut off, for instance, it’s beneficial to keep going on as long as you can even in a doomed run, because you can gain more knowledge of what’s ahead, which is the most valuable weapon you can have.

Revelations begin to appear more frequently as you dive deeper, leading to the bulk of character backstory and lore that gives context to the world and presents you with the options leading towards your end goal.

Combat

Combat in F&H is extremely deadly. There are no virtually no insignificant battles, and one bad turn can ruin you. At first it seems extremely unfair. Especially as almost every enemy is made up of various targets, such as body, each leg, each arm, and head, and most of these targets all have their own attacks that launch each round if they aren’t destroyed. If you haven’t gathered a full party, chances are you’ll be outnumbered in battle even if there appears to only be a single foe.

Fortunately, the game gives you a huge variety of options to handle enemies both in and out of battle. I don’t want to spoil anything in particular since the discovery of learning these techniques is such a huge part of this game’s appeal. Just know that by experimenting with the many items you find and the special skills that can be learned throughout the game you can really turn the tide of battle and trivialize a lot of the encounters that initially seem completely insurmountable. You have to unlearn a lot of the assumptions that come from other RPGs and try some unusual strategies. Gaining more allies is the single best way of improving your chances in combat, as they provide a lot more health, targets, and options to use items no matter what condition they’re in. One of the first characters you’ll have the option to recruit is a kidnapped little girl who is unable to use any weapons or armor and is essentially unable to deal damage with attacks. Even so, she can be exceptionally useful if you think outside the box a bit.

Most of the time, you’re best off avoiding a fight, which you can frequently do since enemies appear on the exploration screen and can be ran past or hidden from, though they are fast enough that they will always catch you in a straight chase. Therefore the most combat you actually engage in tends to be with the game’s many bosses. The bosses are intimidating, incredibly dangerous, and often have interesting unique mechanics. Talking, an option with every enemy in the game, can result in some very surprisingly advantageous outcomes if you’re willing to risk it. With the way the save system works, you won’t be able to just try a boss over and over so it’s always quite tense trying to learn how to defeat them on the first try.

Conclusion I don’t think I’ve ever had a game make me feel as tense or anxious, which means it should probably come with a warning if you prefer a more fun or casual experience. I’ve also rarely had a game that felt as engaging as F&H, keeping me constantly on the edge of my seat, strategizing, and thinking about my options whenever I wasn’t playing it. The game has not a lot of story or characterization to speak of, sticking to the very vague implication based storytelling popularized by the Fromsoft games like Dark Souls. But it’s setting is extremely evocative and sometimes thought provoking, so it still works in a less direct kind of way, and at least one of the endings did manage to drudge up some emotion in me, so it’s not completely dry or anything. The game features an enormous amount of extremely graphic gore, nudity, and explicit sexual content that is pretty surprising for a modern game. A lot of the very dark humor or horror elements might be upsetting for some though personally I tended to find them a bit too over-the-top for me to take too seriously.

For a solo developer, especially one working in such a relatively short amount of time, Fear and Hunger is an incredible work of art, excelling in so many separate ways that I can’t comprehend how the developer does it all, lol. I find it a deeply inspiring game, and if you’re interested in the making of games it’s worth a look just for the quality.

This game came to my attention about two years back thanks to a streamer offhandedly mentioning that while a game he enjoyed, he couldn't stream it cause the screenshots on the steam page show a monster with a "huge cock". I tried to look for the game before realizing I couldn't initially find it cause of my preference settings. Once I got to the steam page, I confirmed that yeah, that's a huge cock, and while morbidly curious, dismissed the game from my mind. As some people might be aware, the game has recently started gaining notoriety and popularity thanks to significant content creators making videos about it. After avoiding these videos for the past year, I noticed one of my favorite youtube creators, Super Eyepatch Wolf, uploaded a video of it just about a month ago. I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go myself before watching the video. And as much as I hate to admit it and share the same sentiment of so many people, this game kinda really sucks. But I really liked it.

I don't think there's a term or word for it so I'm just gonna call it an anti-game. This game does everything in it's power to drive you away from it every single step of the way. Much like its oppressive atmosphere, the game is basically telling you to leave with each facet of its design. From its grueling, visceral depictions of gore and mutilation, to its insanely convoluted narrative and high difficulty, this game really doesn't want you to play it or even enjoy it. I can't contrast this with confidence either by saying if you push through it despite all this, you'll find a gem of a game because that's really not the case either. If you manage to push through it, learn the ins and outs of the mechanics after many playthroughs and resets, all that really awaits you is a depressingly bleak narrative with more questions than answers. Yet... it's that bleak narrative and imagery it presents to you that makes it difficult to just walk away from once you start getting into it. As you slowly learn how to play and approach the game, you get farther and farther into the dungeons with each playthrough, and are met with increasingly horrifying developments and even more curiosity as to what in the world is happening, and more importantly just what truths lie at the end of the journey and the deepest bowels of this dungeon. Though that said, this game is an ordeal to figure out without any guide or help and I honestly can't say it was a very enjoyable experience in that regard, especially when your playthrough can be deviated or straight up end with a simple mistake. Game mechanics aside though, it really does build a very interesting world and setting that is almost entirely left up to interpretation above all else and clearly where alot of the appeal comes from. For me, that's what drove me to explore as much as I could of the game and its multiple endings. Was it worth it? I'm not sure.

This is a game I would never recommend and would simply keep it locked away in the recesses of my mind, since it very much feels like the kind of game where if you know, you know. A game that you would either stumble upon and immediately walk away from, or let your morbid curiosity get the better of you. Thankfully, I don't need to recommend the game, as its surge in popularity has given rise to many videos explaining just about every detail, piece of lore, and theories one could garnish from this game. Go watch that instead if you're interested. If you do instead decide to play it though, then good luck.

Personally, I feel uncomfortable giving this game 2 stars because the author put a huge amount of work into it. The game has a unique story and, especially, a unique atmosphere. However, this atmosphere takes a big twist. So, to not bait you into playing this game, I gave it 2 stars. Let's discuss...

F&H is a game about the whole world being unfair to you (or, to be more correct, the whole dungeon). The game itself is made on RPG Maker, so don't expect unique engines or something else. BUT, there's a really huge "but" that makes this game very unusual: it's full of violence, cruelty, dismemberment, and other bad things that can happen to your hero (enemies cut off your legs, so you can't walk anymore, diseases that can't be cured and you must cut off your hand to stay alive, and this is the most peaceful things that can happen to your hero).

This game won't guide you through levels; it'll stare at you while you're dying. Even the dungeon itself is a huge trap because you can die by stepping into one (to be fair, the game itself is a trap). The combat system is classic for an RPG: turn-based with choices on what to do. Enemies have some weaknesses (except for some literally gods) and, in fact, all enemies have the ability to one-hit kill you with a certain chance, so it's true to say that the game is really hard. It's hard not only because of the fights but also because saving is not always an option. Can you imagine there's a chance to encounter a really strong boss after you sleep?

Speaking of chance, the game is really based on it because every time you loot something, you throw a coin that decides whether you get good loot or nothing.

I can't talk about the story a lot because I didn't play much myself (but to be hones, some unexpected turns appears that make it interesting, but not so interesting to play it). My friend baited me into playing, and I deleted the game after 18 minutes of playing. But the most interesting fact is that it's a game that no one wants to play but everyone wants to watch how people play it (I'm not an exception—I found a YouTube video where the main plot is explained without violence).

Maybe someone will like this game; it's truly unique. But simple gamers like me should avoid this type of game. Be warned, be careful, and watch your step...