(CW: Mentions to sexual assault)

So, I must preface this review with an important piece of information:

I’m a pussy ass bitch.

I’m not being jokey or facetious when I say this. While I am sort of hard to scare and genuinely enjoy horror media, I also suffer from being one of the worst combos of a person possible: I have ADHD; I’m a scaredy cat; and I’ve been thoroughly dipped and dunked into the tart sauce of cultural christianity. So horror stuff tends to make my overactive imagination, without my consent, force my miopic eyes to use their shittiness at absorbing light to evoke vivid demons and ghouls at the end of my corridor at night, all with just an otherwise unremarkable coat hanger as their medium.

This is relevant because when I found out about Fear&Hunger, which statistically, was around the same time as you did (the SuperEyepatchWolf video), I became very annoying about it, because it’s the exact sort of stuff I like. It’s an unfairly hard and unflinchingly mature RPGMaker game, which, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t shower regularly, you’d say is the entire sort of game the engine’s capable of; it’s clearly inspired by Berserk, which is the favourite manga of some of the worst people you’ll ever met; and has the lightest of rogue elements, which’s the exact sort of thing you know a Microsoft investor would eat up like high frutose corn syrup. What’s not to love?

A lot, if you consider I bought this game in May 2023 and only finished it by the time I’m writing this review, over 10 months later.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe this is, necessarily, the game’s fault. The hype that led to the game becoming not-niche enough for it to have a fandom of people who don’t like any of the subject matters present in the game is definitely justified: it is very much like Eyepatch and other youtubers described it, even if they did liberal use of my favourite corporate euphemism for “lying”, “embellishment”. The game is unforgivable, with most mistakes having immediate consequences, and the worst mistakes only having consequences when, fitting for the game’s setting, you’re in too deep to do anything about it. Combat is swift, and as the game has no real leveling system, strategizing to cut your losses become mandatory – not winning, though, as “winning” is not something common in the game. The infamous coinflips add a very nice, tabletop-esque flavour to the experience, adding to the game’s fantastic presentation: Miro’s artstyle evokes perfectly not only his inspirations on other media, but also is able to wordlessly transmit the deep, all-consuming existential dread one can only experiment by being forced to live in Eastern Europe. The Dungeons look like shit, are described as smelling like shit, blood and cum, and the enemies look like they feed exclusively on those three substances as well, with the sole purpose of raping you.

That being said: remember that I said about “most mistakes”? That’s because of a little secret: the game sorta...runs like shit at the best of times, and like absolute shit at the worst. I’m talking about you not being able to toggle which part of the enemy to target in an attack with your keyboard, and when you try to do it via mouse, you can only select a handful of their body parts. I’m talking about random crashes. I’m talking about the game bugging and leaving you at the menu screen, but the rest of the game is still running, you just can’t see it. I’m talking about the game having the Z and X keys as default Confirm/Back keys, and when you type on an Empty Scroll, the game deciding to read you pressing this same Z key on the “Ok” button to change verse as both Confirm and Z, leading you to losing said scroll because the game doesn’t even hate you, it just can’t do its job properly. A more generous reviewer may say this was done on purpose, and indeed, if I bothered to look at the game’s official server and asked, maybe I would be told that it wasn’t on purpose, but that it was never fixed because they thought it’d be funny, and if that was the case, it would, indeed, be pretty funny. But by doing this thought exercise, I’m giving way too much credit to a game where people, when asked about a bug happening in their game and how to solve it, will just tell you “oh yeah this bug’s always been there, just restart the run” and carry on. I won’t give flak to Miro or anyone involved on the development, however, as this was their first game (which you can definitely tell) and, frankly, all of this is pretty common knowledge if you look for more info on the game online. If you don’t expect something to go wrong at some point when you play this game, you’re sorta playing it wrong.

But what made me take long with this game was that, quite honestly, I was afraid. My first run went terrible: it took way too long, I kept wasting resources, lost limbs and party members, and all of that because I wanted a “pure experience”. I refused to google stuff, just wanting to find out more as I went, and essentially softlocked myself out of any ending that wasn’t E. I didn’t even finish it: I was mad enough at myself that I simply abandoned the game. Because I was afraid of both images in my head: that of the scary, big-cocked monsters that would magically teleport to especifically Peru, and the image of me not knowing what the fuck I was doing.

So this time, I went prepared. I watched video guides, I googled stuff, the whole nine yards. I started a run, made a beeline for Le’garde for that sweet Leg Sweep ability, and did everything right to try and go for the A ending on Terror&Starvation. And I was having a blast, actually! And did not get afraid, even playing in the middle of the night! Because I knew what to do, and was doing shit Right: avoiding unnecessary battles, looking for the right resources. I got lucky enough to get the explosive vial to actually get to Le’garde on the shortest path through the shrub, then got doubly lucky later when I got the Passages book and was able to get the Blue Sin. Early on, somehow, I even had the luck to get both the Bloody Shears (high damage, low accuracy weapon) AND the Spectacles (accessory that raises your accuracy enough that BS would hit more often than not)!

Then the above anecdote of the Z button happened while in Maha’bre, and going out to kill the other Fungerians would take too long and drain too many resources. So I went for ending E instead. It was, even if incredibly frustrating, a pleasant time. I do recommend that you also, if you want, put yourself through these frustrating yet pleasant times as well. I just hope you’re less of a pussy bitch than me so the pleasantness/frustration ratio is a bit more balanced.

I believe Mario is an IP that works wonderfully well as an RPG. Think of its elements, of its narrative, of its worldbuilding itself. My and, I believe, many other DMs have, almost inevitably, added one or more elements from Mario games into their campaigns. "Money being meaningful to gameplay", one of the, now most common-sense ideas in game design, displays this thesis simply by the fact that in most Mario games, it isn't. Is it that big of a deal, considering that the series has always been, paradoxically, the safest trailblazer ever created by the videogame industry? Gay or not, you can't deny how refreshingly quaint it feels to have this colorful cast in this familiar-yet-novel adventure.

The positives: Persona 5 is definitely one of the best looking games on not only the PS4, but on Atlus’ entire gallery. After several years of chasing the heels of the sheer iconic status of Kaneko’s demon illustrations and the surreal aesthetic of Nocturne, Persona 5 was able to, somehow, adapt Soviet-inspired aesthetics to a wide audience without turning it into a punchline about polyamory.

The negatives: did you know that there’s a theory that, in the book of Acts, chapter 17 and verse 23, the unknown god referred in that altar is the gnostic Monad? And that the christian God (NOT YHWH, the jewish God) is referred by gnostics to be the Demiurge, the lesser, tangible reflection of the Monad, which makes It an incredibly interesting parallel to the Qaballistic sephira? And that, with this syncretic reading, Paul and Timothy effectively doomed the people of Athens to live in ignorance of the true essence of the Divine by trying to confine the beautiful magnificence of existence, this true, wonderful shining light of Life experiencing itself captured so poetically by a phrase as simple as “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD”, by giving it a name and an ethnicity and a fleshy, now-dead form, not at all unlike what future medieval priests would consider to be the correct way of binding a demon to your will?

Congratulations, you now have thought more about any of the subject matters in Persona 5 than its entire development team did – collectively.