HomeNewsFear & Hunger
You can grab both Fear & Hunger games for 30% off each in the Steam Summer Sale and you either absolutely should or absolutely should not do thatBad bad feelings at low low prices
Bad bad feelings at low low prices
Image credit:Miro Haverinen
Image credit:Miro Haverinen
TheFear & Hungergames are pitch-black horrorRPGs quite unlike anything else I’ve ever played, taking aspects of JRPG, survivalhorrorandadventure gamesand distilling them into something I’d be tempted to call bleakly nihilistic if they didn’t display so much evident love for their craft. They also both start with a content warning listing “extreme violence, gore, sexual violence, and drug usage”. You’ll want to take this seriously, and just to be clear: the third item on this list does manifest in some tasteless, albeit brief, ways in the first game. It’s a frustrating blemish on what is otherwise an incredibly evocative and creative series, though you can downloada modto censor the more egregious bits. You will miss the full effect of critically severing an ogre’s massive schlong, however.
Fear & Hunger 2: Termina - Release TrailerWatch on YouTube
Fear & Hunger 2: Termina - Release Trailer
The genesis for the first game, apparently, was as a sort of impromptu storytelling game that creatorMiroHaverinen used to play with his uni classmates, where he’d pose them horrific moral choices in a dungeon setting, which became the first game’s trap-and-trauma laden environments. As the name implies, you’ll need to keep your party of characters well fed and sane during your travels. It’s likely the only game in which you can give both a dog and a child opium to calm them down. The Twitter account ‘Can you offer a pipe stuffed with opiates to the dog?’ is much more popular in the timeline we deserve, imo.
You’ll fail repeatedly as you play, losing run after run until you slowly start to acclimate yourself to obscure terrors, becoming fluent in the series’ uniquely sadistic grammar, and picking up tricks to eke out just a little more progress. It sound utterly miserable, but I find this kind of exploration incredibly compelling. It’s got very little to do with thepointsof it all, just the experience, as you slowly form a mental map of these previously inscrutable places, right down to which barrels have the best drugs in them. If you’re looking for something somewhat similar but less intense, though,Felvidekis asingularly stark indie RPGthat probably won’t make you want to go for a wash afterward.
