People often describe the most menacing beasts as having insatiable hungers, be that for violence or evil. In Hungry Horrors, the monsters are very satiable, and you’ll only succeed by literally feeding them.
When I think of roguelikes I often think of eating, but mainly because the earliest that I played (ADOM) and ones that brought me back to the genre (Dungeons of Dreadmor) required not only careful combat but the eating of food in order to heal and stay healthy. Hungry Horrors isn’t a roguelike though, it’s a rogue-lite; A run-based affair with unlocks persisting through runs, but food plays just as much — in fact, more — of a role as those other games.
That’s because this is a multifaceted deck-builder. You’ll collect ingredients which then allow you to create new cards — in this case, recipe cards — which you’ll then equip as your draw deck for use while fighting of the various (currently six) monsters in the caves beneath your castle. These foodstuffs range from Pottage to Pickled Eggs, and not only feed the beasts but have tastes, create cravings and have other effects — you can also eat them yourselves to restore stamina. For example, in the demo it has you feed a monster something that makes them crave salty food, then feed them salty food (Roast Potatoes) to resolve bonus hunger.
As you can imagine, by the end of even a short, 10-room delve, you’ll have added and refined your deck to include 4-5 card combos. As you can imagine, some shuffling is required to get to the cards you need; In the case of Hungry Horrors you can expend stamina (which is the same as your health) to force new cards out, and you’ll want to do that because the enemies do much more than simply attack you. In fact, aside from the fantastic theming, my favourite thing about it is the alternative fail state: If a monster reaches you, you fail.
It’s as simple as that, and in some cases the monster only needs to move four or five times in order to get up to you. That means you’ve got to think fast, and that you probably don’t have time to keep pumping up your stamina (which you’ll definitely want to keep burning to get combos) because as soon as that monster gets adjacent to you, your run ends.
Outside of this, Hungry Horrors will seem incredibly familiar. There are unlocks which persist through runs, each encounter gives a branching choice between the next room to explore, and shops and quests appear among that selection. It’s definitely the culinary theme, and the encroaching instadeath, that make it sing, and no doubt those are the reasons why it secured the win at the recent Develop Brighton Indie Expo.
You can play the Hungry Horrors demo for free, now, on Steam. It’s receiving quite major, regular updates at the moment. You can probably tell that by the difference between the screenshots in this post, some of which are mine, versus the trailer above.
Comments are closed.