For the record, I played the game with a censor mod—which I feel the need to compliment for being very well made; compared to some of the older censor mods for this game, the updated sprites in this mod mesh seamlessly with the originals—because I looked at the list of things that could happen in this game and decided that I was not about that. Even with the censor mod however, Fear & Hunger manages to craft an absolutely oppressive atmosphere between the dungeon’s liminal space-like quality and minimalist sound design.

Honestly, I’m kind of in awe of Fear & Hunger. It’s far from a perfect game, but it’s one of those games that was made with real intention, and with those kinds of games, you can feel that intention in every aspect of the game’s design. The game does a whole lot with relatively little. I wouldn’t describe the game’s titular dungeon as particularly large, but there are so many secrets and branching paths that, when combined with the game’s treasure trove of lore, make for a world and overall experience that feels expansive. This idea of doing a lot with a little applies to the combat as well. As someone who’s messed around with RPG Maker enough times to roughly know how it works, I can confidently say that the limb dismemberment system is an ingenious utilization of the way RPG Maker sets up combat encounters.

I, as I’m sure many of the other people on this site did, first discovered Fear & Hunger via the SuperEyepatchWolf video. In that video, he describes Fear & Hunger as an “immersive sim.” I’m not going to say that this is untrue, but I approached it more like a puzzle game. The dungeon is one giant puzzle, and as I died repeatedly throughout my exploration of the dungeon, I began to figure out the exact steps I needed to take in order to solve that puzzle. There’s more than one solution to the puzzle, which goes back to what I was saying earlier about all of the game’s branching paths, but I never really felt the need to think on my feet. I also didn’t find the game to be as absurdly difficult as that video advertised. There were a couple of chokepoints, sure, but no more than in any other old-school RPG that I’ve played. Perhaps both of these discrepancies could be explained by the fact that I opted to play on Fear & Hunger mode rather than Terror & Starvation mode, but I’ve seen other people online say that Fear & Hunger mode is hard too, so maybe it’s just a difference in approach. Admittedly, I do wish the game encouraged you to use all of its systems more. There’s something to be said about a game that explains nothing to the player and encourages them to discover everything naturally, but you have to have a high level of patience for that which I simply do not possess. I’m not saying that the game should have obnoxious tutorial pop-ups everywhere, just that it should make the existence of certain systems more obvious by including scenarios where the player is encouraged to use them over other options.

I think says a lot about what Fear & Hunger does well that it’s managed to achieve cult status despite being both unabashedly vile and broken in the same manner as Pokémon Red and Blue (which is to say that it looks fine on the surface, but if you do any amount of poking around, you’ll realize that the game is in fact kind of a mess). Those are two colossal things to ask a playerbase to put up with, and yet I, like many others, have found myself engrossed by Fear & Hunger. The way the game’s pieces all come together make for an experience that has the same magnetic pull as the in-universe Dungeon of Fear & Hunger itself.