Fear & Hunger

Playing Fear and Hunger is like shoving a metal sounding rod up your ♥♥♥♥. You either get used to it or learn to love it, but it's painful either way..

a very bright and happy game would recommend for 8 year old kids on par with paw patrol the game

Fear & Hunger has a rather notorious reputation. Soul-crushingly difficult, unmoored from the de facto framework of “fairness” so often upheld in modern game design. Deeply disturbing and gratuitous in ways that would push a majority of people away. Packed with enough obtuse lore to make From Software blush. The game’s reputation is not undeserved. Fear & Hunger has been reduced, time and time again, to a “Youtuber Game”. For the modern adult with a job and other obligations, watching a summary online feels like the easy answer. “What’s wrong with sitting back and letting the guy who gets paid do all the work? The game’s BS anyway.” This review is my plea to you, the reader: [i]do not fall into this trap[/i]. I bounced off of this game over 3 years ago. I thought it was too hard, and I wasn’t cut out for it, and that I would never figure it out. In a lot of ways, I was right. Fear & Hunger is a game that will grind you into the bloodied brickwork of its dungeons over and over again. It will test your patience. You will die, and fail, and restart entire campaigns. Fear & Hunger is a torturer disguised as a videogame. Even after clearing most of the game’s endings, including one S ending, I’m not confident I could run it back. You are always on the backfoot in the dungeons. Ultimately, what makes the torture worthwhile isn’t just the lore. Watching some internet dude neatly lay out the intricacies of Fear & Hunger’s plot is like blending the game, this frankly [i]astonishing[/i] work of art, into a digestible slurry. Free of the inconvenience of texture. Removing the story from its intended context effectively defangs its emotional impact. Fear & Hunger is one of those “videogame experiences”. It’s a game that leaves you with scars. To Fear & Hunger’s detriment, some of its friction is not intended. Fear & Hunger was created in a version of RPG Maker I can only describe as “on hospice care”. Sometimes, the game just does not function. The targeting system will break, the game will softlock and crash, and performance will randomly chug in some areas. For a game that’s already deeply punishing, these sorts of blemishes are unacceptable. If ever there was a game in need of a full remaster to work out the kinks, it’s this one. You might be wondering, “Why go through all this? Why suffer this game’s cruelty?” The answer is actually pretty simple; Fear & Hunger is a horror game. It’s meant to make you feel hopeless as you explore its depths. If you go into this game expecting a smooth, mostly frictionless experience, you are asking for less than what you paid for. Fear & Hunger’s greatest achievement is that it provides a feeling. That feeling just happens to be dread. It’s not all hopeless, though. Over time, the dungeons will start to make more sense. You’ll learn its secret routes, discover powerful weapons, and find allies along the way. The game’s bosses, once oppressive, will fall without much issue. Fear & Hunger is, fundamentally, a game of accruing and applying game knowledge. It’s hard not to find immense satisfaction in that. At the end of the game, after its depths have been endured, after countless deaths and bad coin flips and trips to the wiki, Fear & Hunger will test you one last time. You will feel like nothing you’ve done up to this point mattered. You will want to give up. You will want a guy on YouTube to spoonfeed you its story. You will grit your teeth. And in that deepest, darkest moment, Fear & Hunger will do something unbelievable; [i]it will let you go[/i].