I’ve been playing this commercial RPG Maker game called Fear & Hunger and I wanted to tell you about it. Please let the game’s soundtrack that I linked below play as you read.
Fear & Hunger feels like an RPG Maker game in many respects, but it’s less about fighting enemies than reducing the threat they pose and weighing the risk/rewards of engaging with them at all as you, playing one of a few established archetypes, descend into the kingdom’s worst war dungeons that has itself descended into hellish depravity unknown to mortals and glimpsed only in horrifying fairy tales about old gods and times of even harsher violence. There is gear to collect, key and consumable items to lodge in your inventory, recipes to craft… it’s a real RPG but with its power-gaming values reordered into a more desperate configuration, I think.
It is stylistically a very dark game, with really blunt depictions of sexual violence. I would not be quick to defend this against criticisms that it is edgy. But the tension inherent to the combat (limb-based targeting with disabling consequences) and the horror of exploration and discovery is just… exceptional, really.
The dungeon is intricate and full of horrifying color, with nooks of possibly friendly cultures and ever more awful hostilities. Progression is achieved mostly just by risking, which is of course difficult to do when you are so vulnerable and when a literal coin toss could be the difference between you losing an arm you needed to wield your crummy and only spear weapon. Yes, there is a coin toss system in the game. Collect ‘lucky’ coins to give you better odds whenever fortune or misfortune finds you, such as with a maiming attack by an enemy or any time you want to save without being assaulted in your sleep. This is a very survival horror element that makes saving your game feel like a huge decision to make. There are many save locations that can be made safe or which aren’t actually all that dangerous. And since it’s still just a videogame, if you relax for a minute and give the game a bit of your time you can of course progress.
It’s just that knowledge is key.
I’ve been playing for 8 hours or so over the past week and I am noticing that around this game is that aura of the early times when a Fromsoftware adventure title has just released and there aren’t any guides or fool-proof strategies yet established. And, unless some streamer makes this masochore horror adventure RPG do the impossible by becoming wildly popular, I don’t think that aura is ever really going to dissipate around Fear & Hunger–as it is already several years old. It’s a game with a cult following too weak (or too reverent of the sense of adventure that the game inspires) to really pad out a wikia page with drop-rates let alone maps or a walkthrough. There is also a slight language factor in the obscurity of this game, as I don’t believe the developer’s first language is English.
I’m playing this game and every night learning a little more about the dungeon and the god curs’d dealings going on in it… yet I have no one to share it with.
So I made this thread to introduce you to the game and to set down my soap stone messages, so to speak, for anyone who might become interested enough to play. It’s a cheap game on its own, but I am sure that with the start of the halloween season steam sale tomorrow it will become at least slightly cheaper. And if you end up buying it, post in the thread to let me know. Ask for tips! Offer some too because, hell, I don’t know what’s going on down here in the dungeons of Fear & Hunger…
