Games for me can fail in two ways: 1) They can be trite, obtusely defined, product oriented amalgams of mechanics that serve no practical, theoretical, or material definition of art (whether that be Kael's appreciable "trash" or Danto's atomic transfigurative, both are viable as an end goal) that play in an aptly metaphoric exercise for hiking in smog, or 2) they can suffer the pile up of disparities conceived well enough in isolation all colliding wondrously after being let loose to pursue a goal lofty and tremendous. Ubisoft open world games are nearly always the first, as is something like Dead Estate, and Fear and Hunger is, heart-achingly, of the second class.
Grotesqueness immediately feels pungent within the construction of a JRPG in a smoke pervasive that doesn't cloud or fog or fill up a room with stink in most other ordered mechanical genres; the slowness of every interaction, each step a choice and each choice is a boolean factorial that grows exponentially from each serially made prior, feeling less the acclimatizing integration of your action parameters than the more adjective laden verb sets of other games - shooters take place behind the gun, visual novels take place behind the text, walking sims take place off the path, and JRPGs take place in the menus. If the menu is optioned as attack evil monsters, run to save a village, and heal your good and loyal friends, excellent, a choice along moral lines is codified by systemic immutability. In Fear and Hunger, that immutability is formed around vileness that is without remorse or forgiveness in contextual granularity; you choose to desecrate corpses, commit sexual atrocities, profane the idea of equilibrium as we know it, all without the flexibility that excuses action in something situationally obscured by minor art and mechanical vagaries. Short and simple, you either are the type of player who is irredeemable systemically in this world in a way that Bioshock or Spec Ops did not allow for, or you are not, and if you are not, you are probably dead.
Death at that agentless squeamish impulse to not disabuse yourself of the empathetic rote exacerbations players have meta-texted their way into every game is not this games weakness. I was willing to play the game's gambit when I felt it was necessary to progress, and I did it over and over again and it always felt objectionably terrible. Death was a lesson in calcifying cruelty as a lens that people don't have to take but may be enticed to take should their hopes be purely selfish (there is a reason that the other PCs tell you to leave, and the reason is both impressionable selfishness on your part and their part), and repeatedly dying didn't bother me. What makes this game, for me, an abject failure is that recidivistically plunging my hands into the murk was offset by the lack of developer commitment to their greater strengths: primarily, death and horrible action are your markers of progression. Yet, the mechanical lesson after internalizing and continually working over those emotions is not throw your babes into the blaze, but run away after each turn of combat, and restart the campaign every time you load in until you randomly loot the containers with a high roll, and save before you do your coin tosses for the floor, and always take lockpicking not because you think genuinely that thievery and deprivation is your good for this world but because it's the gaudily correct mechanical progression interaction.
That's the problem with Fear and Hunger - its spreadsheet doesn't want to be placed underneath the organs and implements of a Bosch painting, and in games, mechanical framing
always
always
always
ALWAYS imposes itself first and last in the evaluation of thematic concerns.
Grotesqueness immediately feels pungent within the construction of a JRPG in a smoke pervasive that doesn't cloud or fog or fill up a room with stink in most other ordered mechanical genres; the slowness of every interaction, each step a choice and each choice is a boolean factorial that grows exponentially from each serially made prior, feeling less the acclimatizing integration of your action parameters than the more adjective laden verb sets of other games - shooters take place behind the gun, visual novels take place behind the text, walking sims take place off the path, and JRPGs take place in the menus. If the menu is optioned as attack evil monsters, run to save a village, and heal your good and loyal friends, excellent, a choice along moral lines is codified by systemic immutability. In Fear and Hunger, that immutability is formed around vileness that is without remorse or forgiveness in contextual granularity; you choose to desecrate corpses, commit sexual atrocities, profane the idea of equilibrium as we know it, all without the flexibility that excuses action in something situationally obscured by minor art and mechanical vagaries. Short and simple, you either are the type of player who is irredeemable systemically in this world in a way that Bioshock or Spec Ops did not allow for, or you are not, and if you are not, you are probably dead.
Death at that agentless squeamish impulse to not disabuse yourself of the empathetic rote exacerbations players have meta-texted their way into every game is not this games weakness. I was willing to play the game's gambit when I felt it was necessary to progress, and I did it over and over again and it always felt objectionably terrible. Death was a lesson in calcifying cruelty as a lens that people don't have to take but may be enticed to take should their hopes be purely selfish (there is a reason that the other PCs tell you to leave, and the reason is both impressionable selfishness on your part and their part), and repeatedly dying didn't bother me. What makes this game, for me, an abject failure is that recidivistically plunging my hands into the murk was offset by the lack of developer commitment to their greater strengths: primarily, death and horrible action are your markers of progression. Yet, the mechanical lesson after internalizing and continually working over those emotions is not throw your babes into the blaze, but run away after each turn of combat, and restart the campaign every time you load in until you randomly loot the containers with a high roll, and save before you do your coin tosses for the floor, and always take lockpicking not because you think genuinely that thievery and deprivation is your good for this world but because it's the gaudily correct mechanical progression interaction.
That's the problem with Fear and Hunger - its spreadsheet doesn't want to be placed underneath the organs and implements of a Bosch painting, and in games, mechanical framing
always
always
always
ALWAYS imposes itself first and last in the evaluation of thematic concerns.