There are three ways to approach Fear & Hunger. Yes, this is an overly reductive take, but bear with me.

The first approach is casual. Load it up, wander around, lose your shit at the first sight of a stinger, die early, and then quit and experience the game vicariously via YouTube. Approached this way, F&H is actually a great experience. It has a unique aesthetic and broaches topics that rarely appear in the medium of games.

The second approach is hardcore. Play for a while, die a lot, double down, study the wiki, learn the best strategies, take advantage of the game’s secrets, and become an F&H expert. For gamers who want to dig in deep, F&H can also be an excellent game. It offers all sorts of mechanics, many of which are hidden, for tenacious players to discover and exploit. Likewise, it’s packed with rewarding secrets for those willing to put in the work. Notably, players who play this way are also the ones who make captivating Let’s Play videos of the game.

Which brings us to the third way, a middle approach which falls between the first two. More dedicated than casual, but not as deep-diving as hardcore. This is where I fall in the F&H spectrum, and as you probably guessed from the two-star rating I slapped on this review, I did not have a good time.

The biggest issue for me is time. Fear & Hunger is a slow game. Your character walks like they’re wearing stone boots. Yes, there are ways to move faster, but you won’t find them unless you engage in lots of trial and error or read a guide.

The slow pace is exacerbated by the fact that life or death is often predicated a literal coinflip. Yes, there are many ways to avoid coinflips – methods which you can learn via extensive trial and error or guides. If you’re really crafty, you can even find a way to turn the coin flips in your favor – but it’s a secret you’re unlikely to discover without the help of a guide.

Personally, I found that the slow pace and chance-based deaths worked against the horror elements. Horror works best when there’s a sense of relief every now and then, but here it’s all tension all the time. Likewise for the obscenity: The game turns the flesh up to 11 early, and after ten or fifteen minutes I was completely inured to the depravity. When everything is obscene, nothing is.

After a few failed runs, I grew tired of the tedium. Under most circumstances I would’ve just dropped the game, but it was the game of the month for a group I’m in, so I felt compelled to finish it. So instead of quitting I downloaded a “Game Genie-fied” version (whoops – my age is showing) of the game that gave me lots of extra weapons and items and plowed my way through.

A few hours later, I limped across the finish line. Burnt out as I was, I was still feeling curious about why everyone else loves this game, so I jumped over to YouTube and watched a few Let’s Plays. Taking a step back like this, extricating myself from the brutality, helped me appreciate the game more. The art is lovely, and there are all sorts of cool mechanics that I didn’t even know existed.

That’s good and all. But it doesn’t change the fact that my experience playing the game was less Fear & Hunger and more Tedium & Frustration.

I played a couple of hours of this and found it an edgy, mean, and awful experience. Atmospheric, with excellent music and compelling visual design as well as what I am given to understand are some jolly interesting mechanics. However, for all its rampant misery, grossness, pain, and rape, there was no contrasting humanity that made it in any way affecting to me.

That's why 'Berserk', for instance, needs its Golden Age. I care about its characters' pain because they are driven by human emotions that I understand, and that makes the horrors they go through all the more affecting. Retrieving Some Rando, Esq. is too flimsy of a goal for me to push through the awfulness. When I was 15, I probably would've appreciated the pure spectacle of its crass grotesquerie, but not anymore.

Oh man, there is too much I could say about this experience. The most fascinating game I played this year and one of the most I ever will play (and the most fucked up). Somehow this little RPG Maker game kept itself planted inside my head for weeks after first discovering it during all of my waking hours not playing it even while I was playing through it alongside the likes of FF16 and OG Pikmin. Super Eyepatch Wolf has a wonderful video about this game that I would recommend anyone at least a little bit intrigued by this game watch.

This is just a pending review. Just my initial thoughts about the game. I'm making this since i don't know if i'll finish it.

I went into this game fully knowing that it's very punishing, but there's a goddamn line. This game isn't "punishing", it's just so unfair to the point where it's borderline unfun. Shin Megami Tensei is punishing in the way that if you don't understand the basic gameplay fundamentals (Press turns, weaknesses, absorbing & repelling, etc) then you'll get fucked because you don't know the game. Here in Fear & Hunger, even if you do know the game (I'll get more into that sentence later), you'll still get fucked because it's not fair at all and there's nothing that the game does to make it fair.

It's RNG at it's worst. Every single thing is decided by RNG in this game. Gonna search a barrel? RNG because it's different each time. Want to start a new character because you fucked the last one over? RNG becase the layout of every room is different each time, which does not contribute to a goddamn thing except dissorienting you. Want to do literally anything? Do a damn coinflip. Everything, everyone, and their goddamn mother needs a coinflip in this game. It's cool the first time, but gets tiring fast.

And back to what i said about "knowing the game", you can't. Unless you use a guide. If you don't use a guide then you won't find the good items, know what items even do, know where to go, what to do, basically everything. It's so tedious when you go into the game blind that i don't see how people can bother.

And the atmosphere is just boring. It's the same issue Bloodborne has, where you start up the game and get really freaked out by this creepy atmosphere, and then 1 hour later you don't care anymore because that's all the atmosphere the game has. If your game is constantly creepy, then after a while it's not creepy anymore since it just becomes normal because there is nothing else.

Other small issues i have with the game is that some corridors are slanted but your character can only go up, down, left or right so it makes traversing them hella tedious. The Hunger bare is just annoying and not implemented well. And sound design for sound effects isn't very good.

But i don't know, maybe Fear & Hunger isn't my cup of tea, and it just caters to some specific, sadist audience.

This is one of those games that is really hard to represent on a simple 5 star scale. There are elements that I think are 4-5 out of 5 and there are elements that I think are less good. The atmosphere, a lot of the mechanics, the story and the lore are really good. But, I would be very reluctant to suggest this game to most people. I think a lot of the trial and error elements go a little further than they need to. There's also quite a bit of "edgy" material in this. The developer is exploring a lot of dark ideas and I think usually is doing something interesting with the edginess. I think there are moments where to goes further than it needs to, which as i mentioned earlier makes it hard to recommend this game.