Fear & Hunger
Fear & Hunger is a horror dungeon crawler set in the dark and hopeless dungeons of fear and hunger. Four misfortuned adventurers dwell deeper and deeper to the darkness and uncover the secrets this ancient fortress holds inside. The fortress works as an ancient nexus for different planes of existence. The depths are in an eternal turmoil as both old and new gods struggle for power, it’s up to the players to choose their position and stance in all of this.
The game is a hybrid of survival horror and dungeon crawler genres with its influences ranging from Silent Hill to Nethack. There are roguelike elements to the game as well as a heavy foundation of a j-RPG. Fear & Hunger is heavy on atmosphere and ruthless in its difficulty.
- Oppressive and relentless atmosphere
- 4 different character classes and many additional characters to recruit
- Unforgiving and unique gameplay
- Randomized elements to keep the game fresh with subsequent playthroughs
- Turn-based Strategic Dismember Combat System
- Graphical art style mixing pixel art with digital painting
- Original ambient soundtrack creating the dreary mood
The world of Fear & Hunger is VERY dark. THE GAME IS MEANT ONLY FOR MATURE AUDIENCES! Extreme violence and gore are everyday sights in the dungeons and death is one of the easier ways to go in the game. The game has drug and substance abuse, heavy themes ranging from self-mutilation to sexual violence. None of the themes are taken lightly however. They are all part of the world building and there to create the unique atmosphere where the game measures just how far the player is willing to go in order to survive.
Parts of the dungeon layout, events, loot and enemy placements are randomized with few different variations to keep things fresh with subsequent playthroughs. The game is designed with the classic trial and error formula, so you can expect to start the game over and over again. But as long as you learn from your mistakes, you can quickly find yourself at the deeper levels of the dungeon.
The combat in Fear & Hunger is turn-based akin to classic role-playing games, but with a twist of it’s own. You can target individual limbs of your enemies to dismember them strategically and thus maximize your chances for survival. However, just the same, enemies can also cut off the arms and the legs of your playable characters if you are not careful. You need to prepare well for every encounter if you wish to stay alive. But don’t forget that running away from threats is often the best solution as well. There are many ways for survival in Fear & Hunger – You can find better equipment, learn different blood and love magic, fuse characters into each other, pray different gods, talk your way out of battles, meet new party members, snipe enemies from distance, use traps to disable them… and so on. The Idea is to use what you got at your disposal and be creative with it.
Game Discussion
Steam User 348
everyone involved in the making of this game should be studied in a lab and probably never allowed among the general public.
Steam User 144
This game is the opposite of Undertale, each time you die you become less determined and less willing to enter the dungeons
Steam User 296
Absolutely an amazing game. Very family friendly, great for kids
Steam User 121
There’s not a whole lot of helpful reviews for this game on Steam, most of them either being people who misunderstand the dark themes as being “fetishistic” or “trashy shock value”, which yes, while it is shocking to get into your first combat encounter and see an enemy with a huge, exposed “stinger” as it is called, and the potential repercussions of losing said fight, at no point is it being made a joke or something meant to titillate the player. The whole premise of the dungeon itself is that it harbours some of the greatest evil mankind could possibly possess, and it proves that to you time and time again.
Yes, the game is unforgiving and brutal. That’s part of the charm. The game will seem like complete RNG and like you just spent 8$ to hate yourself. However, this is 100% remedied by your own knowledge of the game, and trial and error. Every combat is a puzzle, nearly every enemy has an “optimal” order of operations for what limbs to sever, and for when they will do certain attacks. Simply understanding how each encounter works will take you so much further than you would most likely think from how most people talk about this game. Frankly, it’s almost “easy” to an extent once you actually know what you’re doing. I don’t know how many games I can think of that indirectly reward you for doing your homework and/or actually paying attention to what happens both in combat and out.
There are some elements of the game that always rely on a bit of chance, such as your party members missing their attacks, status effects not successfully procc’ing, bad luck with your coin flips (because the game literally does make you call heads or tails before showing you what you get), and random loot from things like bookshelves or chests that can absolutely make or break a run, but that’s part of what keeps the game tense even when you are fully prepared.
The game actually goes out of its way to make sure you understand that you do NOT have to take every single possible combat encounter available. Plenty of enemies do not drop good rewards, and there’s a whole level of skill alone in learning how to dodge patrolling enemies and preventing yourself from getting pinned between two trying to get you into separate encounters.
If the content of the game is too much for you, then that’s okay, but it’s not a moral failing of the developer, nor of the players who do enjoy the game. The atmosphere is the darkest and grisliest of any game that I can think of in recent memory while still being respectful of the topics. It’s *supposed* to be a terrible thing that you avoid.
There are some very light “roguelike” elements being many different areas of the map having multiple variations that are randomly chosen at the start of your save file, but with time, you should be able to get from the top to the bottom of the dungeon even if you have never seen the current layout that you’re playing. Any review saying the game is “pure RNG” genuinely either do not want to learn how the game works, or have an actual skill issue.
There’s also many different endings to the game of varying levels of disparity for your party, giving you a reason to play multiple runs, try each character, and try building a team of four with different members each time. I myself still have several to do, if I could ever bring myself to leave the Girl in a cage on the first floor (which I can’t).
All in all, this game is extremely unique, with a very heavy and dark atmosphere that can’t really be matched by anything else available right now. It’s an RPG with no power levelling that wants you to fail a few times so that you learn and you can survive the next run with the knowledge you gained from the last. It truly is only impossible if you are unwilling to change up what you’re doing and pay attention to the details it gives you.
Steam User 144
The only instance that I know of where both the game and the player actively try their hardest to out-BS each other at every moment.
If I could describe Fear & Hunger for the experience that it puts you through rather than the gameplay, I think it'd be like Terraria and Dark Souls put in a blender and then getting force fed said experience.
First
This game doesn't care about your time. It doesn't respect it and it doesn't give a ♥♥♥♥. You worked a 9-5 shift today and would like to make some progress in F&H? One single mistake (or a bad roll of the dice, which is even worse) can quite literally undo a whole day of progress, and the game will be like "yeah, and? go ♥♥♥♥ yourself". The real masochism is the player tolerating the experience, but then again, this is quite literally what you signed up for.
Second
The amount of information you need to clear this game can be more obscure and esoteric than some real life occultism cults. Playing this with a wiki open is not cheating or "easy mode", I'd say it's the same as Terraria: you NEED to do it if you wish to understand the most basic mechanics of the game. It's even funnier because there are 2 wikis and both of them are incomplete, sometimes with information in one contradicting the other, so like an in-game coinflip, you have a 50% chance of getting your information right.
Third
You're here for the experience, everything else is secondary. Just like Dark Souls (or any Souls Like) you can mostly ignore the overall storyline, and instead repeatedly bash your head against the wall that is trying to reach your next goal, just to do the same afterwards. The real F&H is suffering through the bs, the incomprehensible design choices, the insane gameplay mechanics, the outright schizo puzzle solutions. This is the kind of game and community that engages with the game, and that's exactly why we all like this.
It has been said to death, but THIS GAME IS NOT FOR EVERYONE. It's addicting, yes. It's extremely satisfying to pull off, yes. But it can also be punishing and cruel for no reason other than giving you a fat ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ middle finger and saying "whoops, you did nothing wrong, just unlucky, try again bozo".
Steam User 105
I opened the game, picked mercenary, named him, picked an honest life at the start, entered the dungeon, literally got ass f****d by the first enemy. Start over again with the same class, picked lockpicking, found a little girl, fought the same guy from the start again, got ass f****d in front of the little girl.
All in less than 40 minutes mind you.
10/10 game would beat again.
Steam User 112
Fear & Hunger has a rather notorious reputation. Soul-crushingly difficult, unmoored from the de facto framework of “fairness” so often upheld in modern game design. Deeply disturbing and gratuitous in ways that would push a majority of people away. Packed with enough obtuse lore to make From Software blush.
The game’s reputation is not undeserved. Fear & Hunger has been reduced, time and time again, to a “Youtuber Game”. For the modern adult with a job and other obligations, watching a summary online feels like the easy answer. “What’s wrong with sitting back and letting the guy who gets paid do all the work? The game’s BS anyway.”
This review is my plea to you, the reader: do not fall into this trap. I bounced off of this game over 3 years ago. I thought it was too hard, and I wasn’t cut out for it, and that I would never figure it out. In a lot of ways, I was right.
Fear & Hunger is a game that will grind you into the bloodied brickwork of its dungeons over and over again. It will test your patience. You will die, and fail, and restart entire campaigns. Fear & Hunger is a torturer disguised as a videogame. Even after clearing most of the game’s endings, including one S ending, I’m not confident I could run it back. You are always on the backfoot in the dungeons.
Ultimately, what makes the torture worthwhile isn’t just the lore. Watching some internet dude neatly lay out the intricacies of Fear & Hunger’s plot is like blending the game, this frankly astonishing work of art, into a digestible slurry. Free of the inconvenience of texture. Removing the story from its intended context effectively defangs its emotional impact. Fear & Hunger is one of those “videogame experiences”. It’s a game that leaves you with scars.
To Fear & Hunger’s detriment, some of its friction is not intended. Fear & Hunger was created in a version of RPG Maker I can only describe as “on hospice care”. Sometimes, the game just does not function. The targeting system will break, the game will softlock and crash, and performance will randomly chug in some areas. For a game that’s already deeply punishing, these sorts of blemishes are unacceptable. If ever there was a game in need of a full remaster to work out the kinks, it’s this one.
You might be wondering, “Why go through all this? Why suffer this game’s cruelty?” The answer is actually pretty simple; Fear & Hunger is a horror game. It’s meant to make you feel hopeless as you explore its depths. If you go into this game expecting a smooth, mostly frictionless experience, you are asking for less than what you paid for. Fear & Hunger’s greatest achievement is that it provides a feeling. That feeling just happens to be dread.
It’s not all hopeless, though. Over time, the dungeons will start to make more sense. You’ll learn its secret routes, discover powerful weapons, and find allies along the way. The game’s bosses, once oppressive, will fall without much issue. Fear & Hunger is, fundamentally, a game of accruing and applying game knowledge. It’s hard not to find immense satisfaction in that.
At the end of the game, after its depths have been endured, after countless deaths and bad coin flips and trips to the wiki, Fear & Hunger will test you one last time. You will feel like nothing you’ve done up to this point mattered. You will want to give up. You will want a guy on YouTube to spoonfeed you its story. You will grit your teeth. And in that deepest, darkest moment, Fear & Hunger will do something unbelievable; it will let you go.