Fear & Hunger

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Fear & Hunger
"No matter what's the cost, you must do everything in your power to survive. Just how far will you go...?"
Protagonist(s): Mercenary (Cahara) Knight (D'arce) Dark Priest (Enki) Outlander (Ragnvaldr) Genre(s): Role-playing game Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Release: December 11, 2018 Engine: RPG Maker MV Developer(s): Miro Haverinen Publisher(s): Happy Paintings Country: Finland Series: Fear & Hunger Successor: Fear & Hunger 2: Termina

Fear & Hunger is an indie dark fantasy/horror dungeon crawler RPG developed by Miro Haverinen (aka orange~) and published by Happy Paintings. It was released on Steam on December 11, 2018.

The game spawned a sequel called Fear & Hunger 2: Termina, which was released on Steam on December 9, 2022.

Why It's Brave and Well-Fed

1. Absolutely gorgeous graphics that are almost on par with Blasphemous. The character portraits and in-battle sprites are worth noting as they are detailed enough to look like digital paintings.
2. The gameplay is an interesting mix of RPG and Roguelike with some horror and Lovecraftian elements.
   • Some useful abilities you have in the overworld are setting up beartraps on your enemies and firing arrows at them to damage them.
3. The fear (phobia) and hunger systems, while distressing, adds to the game's challenge.
4. Turn-based combat system is highly unique compared to other RPGs, as it lets you chop any body part off of enemies (depending on which enemy you fight with). But likewise, they’ll do the same to you if you’re not careful.
5. While there are some deadly coin-flip moves that enemies have, you can easily block almost all of them by just guarding so you don't get insta-killed (depending on which enemy you fight with).
6. Extremely dark, foreboding storyline and atmosphere that has several interesting, yet disturbing lores (though not without some heavy subject matter).
7. Four different characters to choose from:
   • Cahara the Mercenary
   • D’arce the Knight
   • Enki the Dark Priest
   • Ragnvaldr the Outlander
8. You can recruit many party members, including the skeletons, the ghouls, and the Moonless (the latter of which requires two pieces of rotten meat in battle).
9. Excellent character designs for most of the characters, including the playable characters themselves.
10. Monsters are memorably hideous and terrifying, akin to the monsters from various horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
    • The Crow Mauler, in particular, gets an honorable mention as he has Silent Hill vibes due to his resemblance to the Pyramid Head.
    • The Greater Blight brings memories of Dino Crisis due to it being a monstrous T-rex.
    • The Salmonsnake is a nod to the Alligator from Resident Evil 2 (and its 2019 remake).
11. Boss fights, while frustrating, provide a great sense of challenge.
    • The three bosses mentioned above are pretty good examples.
    • The Old Gods and New Gods require different tactics as they can be quite tricky at times.
      • Francóis, in particular, is completely immune to decapitation. So you'll have to cut off his limbs before going at his torso.
        • Furthermore, you can easily cheese the whole boss fight with him with the dialogue options in this wiki article about him.
      • The Yellow King (aka Le'garde's ascended form) is very challenging due to not just highly damaging moves, but also the fact that he has a snake that heals him and the asterisk that he keeps summoning. He also has Salvation (read: an insta-death move) that you need to block with guard.
      • Gro-goroth. Enough said.
12. The Hexen Table allows you to acquire new skills (depending on which god you're associated with) or curse your weapons into stronger variants.
13. Speaking of skills, many of the best, most useful ones in the game are Dash, Blood Portal (fast travel), Necromancy (allows you to recruit skeletons and ghouls), Blood Golem, and Pheromones.
14. Several useful items throughout:
    • Empty scrolls and quills are also extremely useful as they grant you almost everything you want.
    • Books of Enlightenment are also pretty handy items that save your progress anywhere in the game. Best of all, they don't rely on coin flips.
    • Soul Stones absorb the souls of enemies which can be either equipped or used at Hexen Tables.
15. Terrific music that fits well with the game’s already grim tone (despite sounding almost quiet), especially “Prelude to Darkness”.
16. Multiple different endings to choose from (player character-specific endings included), which adds to the game’s replay value.
17. There are other extras like “Terror & Starvation” and Hard Mode difficulties (which have more challenges than the normal difficulty, as well as exclusive enemies) and the unlockable “Dungeon Nights” dating sim.
18. Since it's made with an RPG Maker MV engine, the game is fully moddable. The best of these mods is Reign of New Gods and there's also some useful plugin mods such as 99 Books of Enlightenment, for example.
19. While long in length, it is possible to speedrun this game if you can memorize everything in it.

Bad Qualities

1. Similar to games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring, the game, while challenging, can be extremely unforgiving for inexperienced gamers, especially first-timers.
   • Some of the enemies and bosses are really annoying to deal with and some of their attacks result in an instant game over. Such as:
     • The aforementioned Crow Mauler is one of the worst offenders as he has a lot of HP, deals tons of damage with dangerous status effects (blindness and broken bones), and worst of all, he has an instadeath move in which he pecks your characters’ heads off unless you blind him.
       • On the topic of blindness, it makes the entire screen go black when not in battle, which is extremely frustrating.
     • The Lizardman is quite dangerous for a regular enemy as he has very damaging sword moves that cause limb loss or sometimes limb infection and his counters attacks with heavy damage with his shield.
     • The Greater Blight (also aforementioned) is one of the most distressing bosses as once you encounter it, there’s no escaping from it. Not helping any is the fact that it deals extreme damage that will kill the player in one turn (if they’re not properly armored), making it almost impossible to fight with it with one party member. Fortunately, it spends four turns without attacking, giving you enough time to prepare for this fight.
     • What's more, enemies had an annoying habit of approaching you while you search the environment for various loot.
   • Hard Mode intentionally prevents you from saving your progress whatsoever, which means if you get killed, it's all the way back to the beginning. This is especially rage-inducing when trying to achieve "The God of Ultra Violence" ending (which is Ragnvaldr's S Ending).
2. Many of the death scenes your character goes through are incredibly painful, gross, and hard to watch. Even worse, some of these scenes have content that’s extremely triggering to some people, such as suicide, self-harm, torture, and even on-screen rape! We’re not joking!
   • To be fair, at least the developer warned players about such offensive content and that it’s not meant to be taken lightly. Rather it serves to give the game a unique atmosphere of serious consequences and hopelessness
   • Thankfully, there's a mod that removes rape scenes involving the guards and harvestmen (if you're easily upset by these scenes).
3. The 50/50 coin toss system in which you guess either heads or tails, while interesting on paper, is quite annoying and it's almost all over the place in the overworld and battles. Heck, not even save spots are safe from coin tosses (with the exception of the Books of Enlightenment).
4. A few bugs, soft locks, and framerate issues.
   • When playing on the Steam Deck, Ma'habre in the past timeline and the Void are the most infamous cases with the frame rate dropping to 5-15 FPS.
5. Some of the characters had flaws:
   • Nas’hrah (one of the characters you recruit) is an unlikable, foul-mouthed, mean-spirited jerk as he often insults and condescends characters throughout the game.
   • Pocketcat (a jolly-looking merchant who sells rare items) is quite creepy as he came off as pedophilic due to the requirement of giving him children in exchange for any of the items he's offering.
6. Anachronism:
   • Bear traps, which are used either ensnare or maim enemies in the overworld, don't actually exist in the 16th century (in this game's case, 1590). Rather, foothold traps like these are first invented in the 17th century.
   • One of the enemies, the Uterus, is a cyborg capable of generating organic Embryos (similar to childbirth). But the trend of cyborgs in fiction doesn't occur until at least the 19th century that starts with Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Man The Was Used Up".
7. Several glaring typos and grammatical errors in some text, such as "noises" being spelled out as "noices", although used as a Michael Rosen meme. Though these can be fixed by modding with the full English mod.
   • At least some of these typos and grammar errors are unintentionally hilarious.

Reception

The game received a "Very Positive" reception on Steam.

Though sales are initially poor due to the aforementioned triggering content, the game managed to have a good, growing cult following and its sales rose to over 100,000 copies as of August 2023.

Trivia

• The game takes inspirations from Silent Hill and Nethack.
• The cover art foreshadows that the game contains self-harm.
• Miasma, one of the most powerful weapons in the game, is heavily inspired by the Soul Edge from the Soulcalibur franchise.
• The unsettling music used in the intro when starting a new game is "Apotheosis" from Kevin MacLeod's album, Ghostpocalypse.
  • MacLeod is notable for composing royalty-free music that are all free to use.
• The line "the stinger is pulsating" (referring to the guard's genital) somewhat became an internet meme that was used in comments to pornographic content, especially NSFW fan art of this game.

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