Roguelikes are one of the oldest game genres, and with their defining features being randomness and permadeath, they are also one of the hardest to succeed at. When I saw the first Fear and Hunger demo appear on here last year, I figured others would do a decent enough job covering it, and stepped back. However, it appears this game didn’t get too much attention since that initial release, which was ultimately to be expected. After all, few people have much tolerance for the challenges explicitly provided by permadeath games, or for the shock/mature content this game revels in, as you can tell by any given screenshot. Over the last year, though, I gained much higher level of tolerance for both, and so decided I could give it a shot.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



To get the obvious out of the way, the art in Fear and Hunger is both custom and is at a far higher level than what you’ll see in the majority of RM games. On map, there’s a more “zoomed-in” perspective, comparable to what XP games did, high, realistic resolution of all objects (unlike the pre-XP RTPs and typical attempts at custom art) and consistently dark and subdued color palette (as opposed to crisp colors of VX-MV RTPs). I particularly like how well the stone is portrayed; it’s always difficult to get right, and whenever Enterbrain artists try, we generally get boring tiles in various shades of light-grey, ones that hurt to look at without liberal use of other objects to break up the monotony. Here, the stone walls of the initial castle, the dirty cobbles in its courtyard, and bricks of later mines/dungeons all look satisfyingly bumpy and textured, so that you can literally feel every stone protruding. (Of course, it’s unlikely that you’ll be looking much at stones in your first few runs, as opposed to the various and practically ever-present gore and depravity, but this is best discussed under storyline.) Then, the immersion provided by these graphics is further aided by the level design. Most importantly, it abandons the blocky rooms with perfect 90 degree angles and pipe-straight corridors, typical of both the conventional RM games and conventional roguelikes. Fear & Hunger is not afraid to place walkways at a steep angle if it makes for a better “shot”, and its rooms often seem to flow into each other with their heavily rounded corners. In all, Fear and Hunger is the rare game to reverse the typical rmk graphics rule; the graphics on the turn-based combat screens with invariably exceed what’s portrayed on the map. Here, it’s actually the weakest part of the package.

That’s not to say the combat artwork is bad; the watercolor look is always consistent on its own merits and most screens look pretty well. I would only really suggest improvements to combat screens during the “Prison” level (done in the style of Silent Hill’s Otherworld, with bloodied iron mesh for floor, etc.). In-combat character sprites and animations are much more of a concern; in particular, the Girl has a blurry orange mess in place of hair, and the animation for “Talk” action is painfully short of frames, at least for the Outlander character. In contrast, the character portraits are well-drawn, and so are the illustrated books/documents. While the latter is not that unusual (who can forget the crude, yet fascinatingly otherworldly drawings in OFF), the only game where I remember it done at comparable level is OMNIS: The Erias Line (which sadly seems to be forever stuck in its demo stage after a failed Kickstarter and developer’s desire to rebuild it from ground up in the wake of that).

Then, the sound side of things. The game page states that the soundtrack was inspired by Akira Yamaoka, and I guess that’s true, but with a caveat: said inspiration is entirely taken from the grinding, industrial ambience better associated with the first game, rather than the piano compositions of 2 and 3 he’s best known for. Of course, same kind of ambience was used in those as well, but let’s be honest, people associate Silent Hill 2 OST with Theme of Laura, not Silent Heaven. Then again, I suppose said approach is far more faithful then simply sticking True or Null Moon, both sublime but written explicitly to highlight pivotal moments in the narrative, as a goddamn background theme, often in the first level you encounter. (Sin I’ve seen in both the abominable Lakewood Story, and the far superior, but still heavily flawed, Iron Gaia: Virus.)



Speaking of Silent Hill, here we have this game's equivalent to Pyramid Head, now sans both arms and with leg wounds. Has an instakill peck you can't avoid once it triggers. However, it doesn't work on skeletons, and so Noloki kept fighting automatically for about 10 minutes and finished the job.



That was a pyrrhic victory, since the main character was already dead, even if he still appears on-map (Unlike dead companions, who immediately leave party and fall down on the map itself). Next time I fought him, though, I managed to triumph without losses.

Anyway, that’s enough talk about soundtrack’s inspirations. Its actual quality is more than fine, though the only tracks I would listen to outside of the game are The Four Apostles (best of the industrial tracks, used in the game’s most cruel boss battle(s)), The Fortress (a melancholic piece actually closest to “classic Yamaoka”) and perhaps Ma’habre Streets (you’’ll know that track if/when you chance to encounter it.) Sound effects, however, deserve great praise. I want to particularly compliment the work done on the footsteps: something I focused a lot on in my early reviews, and still bring up when I consider it important. Here, they are not just present, but they are also varied and wholly believable: walking on the stone floor sounds different from walking on the carpet, which sounds different from walking on the grass. (All of that sounds perfect for stealth gameplay, but sadly appears entirely irrelevant to your detection chances.) These are the effects I remember, but the rest is also all fitting. I suppose I could say that certain moments, like the mass orgy scene you are bound to encounter pretty early in the game, are unusual by their total silence. However, that may be intentional to make them more eerie. Besides, I am remain faintly amazed this game is still on here in the first place, given how far it pushes the usual rules on the permitted content.

Storyline



He's way too right about that.

The game page promises “The darkest and the most morbid fictional world you will encounter”. That statement may well be true; there’s pretty much no stone left unturned in search of ways to make the game live up to it. Rotting, dead, naked, mutilated bodies? Check; you find them pretty much from the get-go. Whole piles of these bodies, with flies buzzing around? Check. An entire area with a flesh floor and walls made out of naked corpses mashed together like cinderblock? Check. The aforementioned naked orgy? Check. Nude enemies in combat, where cutting off the genitals is often not just possible, but outright desirable? Check. The ability to obtain milk from the breasts of a chained-up, semi-humanoid creature? Check. Cannibalism and auto-cannibalism? Check. Torture, potentially done to the player character? Check. An enemy that can anally rape the player character? Check. Evil gods who demand sacrifices and a similarly twisted version of Christianity alongside them? Check. Child murder as part of the lore? Check. A whole lot of literal shit? Check. I think the only thing I haven’t encountered is bestiality, and that may yet get patched into the final release.

So, it actually might be the darkest and most morbid world if you were to “objectively” count all these instances, beyond my summary above. However, a different way to look at it, and one I suspect most players would go by, is whether all of this is actually affecting on the emotional level. Here, Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is in full effect. There’s just too much of this stuff, too early: it’s not even clear where all the hundreds of dead bodies are coming from, for one thing, and so you don’t believe in the reality of anything supposedly going on in the game, and none of it registers. I soon greeted just about every new attempt to shock me with the latest outrageous occurrence with a shrug. The one moment that somewhat resonated was apparently added relatively recently, and comes near the end of the available areas. There, your desire to explore the game will (if you do not get killed, obviously) eventually result in a genocide of an entire village. You do see that its non-human dwellers sacrificed plenty of humans themselves, and it doesn’t appear possible to avoid any combat once initiated. Nevertheless, the question of whether it was worth it lingers, which is more than what I can say for anything else in the game. Sure, other people may have a different reaction. Moreover, as someone who currently works in a large hospital, and has seen enough actual dead bodies and diseased live ones, I suspect I am rendered practically immune to this kind of shock content.

Things look up if we leave tone alone for a moment, and look at just what the game actually puts on the page in its textboxes, though it may still vary widely. It mainly excels with the "atmosphere-building" lines, such as a single line you'll get at the start of any battle, randomly chosen out of 2-3 for every enemy type ("Prison Guard measures up your body proportions"; "The air is thick with the anticipation of violence; "Chanting is heard from behind the priest's hood") or the responses to the in-combat conversations (more on that in Gameplay.) Some of the non-conversational writing is also pretty good. One example is the way you encounter a Mercenary (assuming that's not who you are playing as), then lose him for a while again. Then you have the subtle interactions required with the Girl, most likely the first companion you'll get. She's also either literally mute or too traumatised to speak, and attempts to talk to her return either gazes, faint smiles or, later on nods. This makes sense, as she's useless to you at first, and is acutely aware of what happens to useless things in this dungeon. As in, there are about 3-4 ways to sacrifice her to potentially get something in return. However, the game rewards you for not wholly abandoning morality as well. With time she becomes substantially more useful in combat (though still weaker than any non-undead companion.) Crucially, I once won her trust to the point she literally threw herself in front of any attacks targeting my character, which felt extremely rewarding, though I never managed to repeat said feat in subsequent runs.





On the other hand, the conversations with the few not (immediately) hostile NPCs often leave much to be desired. The above shows the frankly ridiculous responses you can say to Pocket Cat the first time you encounter him. Said character is potentially foreshadowed in a randomly appearing fairytale book, and exists as a way to convert the Girl into a savepoint. His own lines are fine, though, which often can't be said about the other encounters. For instance, there's a scripted event in the second half of level 2 where you "hear footsteps ahead", are suddenly frozen in place, and a guy named Buckman, of all things, appears and says generic lines about how terrified he is, etc. with basically nothing unique or interesting. On the same level, you can also potentially get an encounter with Trorfur (which seems a randomly scripted thing, as I only triggered it once), a torturer who'll immediately overpower your character without even a fight if you just say "Yes" to him, and then treat you to a long cutscene of him cutting your limbs off while rambling on generic lines about pain and pleasure and sin until you are finally shown the game over screen.

I should also drop a few words about worldbuilding. It's shaky from pretty much the get-go, as you learn that the title is not just a reference to the game’s hunger and sanity mechanics, but is ALSO the name of the whole dungeon complex you are exploring, which is ridiculous. Just who gave that name to it, and why? It’s mentioned in one of the (skippable) prologues that the territory around the dungeon is owned by the Kingdom of Rondon, which seems to be a conventional Medieval state. Why would they choose such an on-the-nose name, or keep it, if someone else came up with it? Like I said before, you do not really learn much about the reason this place exists, besides a single line that it's a "nexus between worlds" and "place for gods to meddle with mortals, etc.", which barely goes halfway to explaining why such a nexus had to be turned into this. (i.e. what have all those prisoners done, and on whose exact authority as they taken here?) You do get two parts of Warden's Journal (see above), but it just restates what any player would already feel about the place, and begs the question as to why a relatively normal-thinking person was put in charge of all the brutish inhuman Guards in the first place.

Fear and Hunger also happens to not just be a (grim)dark fantasy, but is also a very low one. Pretty much all of its fantastical elements are limited to the dungeons themselves (which have creatures like winged cavegnomes or manebas, which are like Deep Stingers from Darkest Dungeon, except with fewer abilities but higher potential damage output) and the gods manipulating the mortals within it, who can grant Necromancy and the like. The surrounding world seems to be as conventional-medieval as it can be, with Western kingdoms and their crusading knights in shining armor, northern wastes like Vinland and their Outlander barbarians, and the East, with sultans and the like. It’s not very creative to say the least, but it’s also not too important on its own. After all, the game does provide some other internal lore that’s cool on its own, like the aforementioned Pocket Cat fairytale, or the self-aggrandising cookbook. A particular highlight is Tales of Ma’habre book, which is one of the moments in the game where I was genuinely impressed by the creativity. Sadly, it goes hand-in-hand with what I find to be the worst writing in the game:



However, it does matter when the interactions you can have within the game seem to fall back on the typical medieval tropes and conflict with what the lore establishes. An early example is the encounter with three dark priests around a human crucified like their Edgy Jesus. They are so caught up in chanting you have to actively bump into them to fight them. Once you do, they are always hostile, even though it doesn’t make sense for at least half the character you can play as. It’s one thing that Dark Priests are attacking their own; what is truly absurd is that it provokes no unique comment from either your character, or them, to the point you can ask them noob questions about the very gods you are serving, who have already blessed you with necromancy and such, and they’ll gladly explain it to you (in between trying to kill you, that is) as if you were an unwashed infidel. The same problem is actually present for Knight as well: she fights in the name of the very same Edgy Jesus they are praying to, so why do they have a problem with each other?



Case in point.

To be fair, this is one thing that can be addressed before the game’s final release, and I really hope it’ll happen. I understand the decision not to include long story segments in such a game very well, but I find that it should really be compensated by high reactivity to events that do happen. The game has already made a very significant step towards that; whichever character you pick out of the four available, the other three still exist in the game world, and not simply as corpses (i.e. Borderlands 2) but as named NPCs who’ll be present at certain points with their quirks and personalities, and are often recruitable. However, it could still go further. For one thing, your companions (both the unchosen protagonists and some other options) are currently irrelevant to all (or almost all) conversations you can engage in, unless an option appears to sacrifice them. It would be really good if they reacted in some dialogues, and, much more importantly, the (rare) NPCs you can speak to reacted to them. For instance, it was pretty funny when a knight character described me “as another sane soul”, completely ignoring the revived skeleton I had in tow. Same goes for how Pocket Cat wants to collect children, but doesn’t say anything about one I had with me (and the girl doesn’t react to his words, for that matter). Moreover, you can potentially find a book with a fairy tale foreshadowing him, but sadly you can’t bring it up in a conversation with him. Similarly, I couldn’t bring up a book detailing resident Frankenstein (or is he more of a Faust?) efforts at creating life when I finally happened to meet him, even though I actually had two copies at the time.

Lastly, some, but by no means all, typos. A particularly common one is the its/it's mistake. I would go as far as to say that nearly every time "it's" appears in the game, there should have been "its" in that place.



Gameplay



Outlander's starting 5 arrows, some initial loot, and the initial mapping, all on display.

After I have finally finished Spelunky Classic in December, and then became one of the few people to have not only played NetHack, but to have beaten it outright, two months ago, it’s fair to say I have much more experience with the genre than most. However, while Fear & Hunger bills itself as a roguelike dungeon crawler, the accent should really be on the “dungeon crawler” as the only things roguelike here are random loot (in containers, that is; stuff dropped from enemies is almost always predetermined), permadeath and the way the levels (or just the opening level?) get their bits and pieces reshuffled a little with every playthrough. “Reshuffled” is the key word, as the rooms themselves remain unchanged, and same typically goes for their enemies and hazards. This is a fine enough decision, but it’s rather incorrect to call this a “roguelike” as it is far away from the randomness of true genre representatives. (In fact, A Hint of a Tint, the only other rmk roguelike-style game I played, is in many ways closer to NetHack than F & H, even though its bright aesthetic is literally its polar opposite.)

Anyway, Fear and Hunger is a dungeon crawler, and like in any dungeon crawler, the key gameplay elements are looting and fighting. However, in most dungeon crawlers the early game is more about fighting and the late game is about picking out the best of the best loot, while in Fear and Hunger is just the opposite. At first, you eagerly scavenge anything that comes your way, anxiously checking the Mind and Hunger meters, while trying to avoid battles; enemies are tough, permadeath is a thing, and even if you win, healing back damage is very difficult, while replacing lost limbs (more on that below) is next to impossible.



You can run away from battles, but some enemies (i.e. these guards) are slightly faster than you are, unless they lost their legs. Once you exit the map, though, you can just walk right past them through the same entrance, as I did in this screenshot.

You soon get acquainted with the coin toss: a mechanic which generally crops up when you are either potentially about to get some good loot from a container, or about to get insta-killed by some unique enemy move (as well as trying to revive the dead with Necromancy and other edge cases.) You get asked to call heads or tails, then you watch the animation and see what happens, with no way to influence its outcome. Getting it right means that the good outcome (loot or enemy missing) occurs, failing either nets you nothing (once I got crappy Cloth Hood as a participation prize) or is a gruesomely described insta-kill, respectively. I once heard that in such cases, always picking one option every time is a guaranteed 50%, while trying to be fidgety and guess the right one when it’s out of your control defaults to about 40%. Even so, I couldn’t resist that temptation regardless.

In all, loot can be separated into food to stave off hunger, other consumables (alcohol to restore sanity, precious health-restoring Blue Vials), weapons and armour, and miscellaneous. The latter includes keys and Red Vials (both open doors, though the latter is also used in crafting), other craft-consumable vials (including empty glass ones that can be filled at times, including the aforementioned “milking” scene), beartraps that can be set on map for enemies to stumble into, lose a leg and be reduced to crawling slowly, tinderboxes to light wall-mounted torches so that your sanity can recover near them, etc. There are also books, obtained (almost) exclusively from the bookshelves, which can be separated into “mere” lore, crafting recipes and a few enormously powerful magical books. Tales of Ma’Habre is one: Book of Enlightenment is far more awesome though, being a way to permanently cheat death by creating a single savepoint once activated.

While not NetHack with its leashes and blindfolds and flutes, it’s nevertheless more than enough for an interesting gameplay system, especially given that the low-fantasy setting obviously excludes the dizzying plethora of enchanted wands, scrolls and potions the latter had. It does provide enough satisfying opportunities, but there also some glaring balancing problems. In particular, the green herbs that heal infection are way too frequent relative to their necessity; after getting my savepoints, I accumulated up to a dozen Green Herbs in subsequent runs, without ever needing to use them. It took another run as a different character before I discovered that only the undead enemies can actually inflict infection, and it seems that their main source are your own failed Necromancy attempts. On the contrary, there are many ways in which your party members could get bleeding; yet, the item patching it up, Cloth Fragment, can be ridiculously rare.



The entire second sentence of that description is basically irrelevant. Only two enemy types have fire attacks, and both are easily disabled. Cold doesn't exist in the game at all.

I would suggest toning down food drops somewhat in favour of providing more of them, as slowly bleeding to death over many minutes for the lack of something this simple is faintly ridiculous. Moreover, you can obtain other cloth items as well: Cloth Hoods in containers, robes from dead Dark Priests and Loincloths from dead Prison Guards. It would make sense if tearing all of them into several cloth fragments was the one “crafting recipe” every character had available by default. It would also help a lot with the problem of low-tier equipment doing nothing but clogging up the inventory. By the time I got my saves in the Outlander run, for instance, I invariably had 3-4 Wooden Bucklers, when at best, only one is useful. It would be cool if you could at least burn them down on some fire, or with a Tinderbox, to get more light and sanity. Same goes for multiple Cleavers once you get good enough at killing guards, etc. In most rpgmaker games/dungeon crawlers, there’s usually a merchant who’ll take that stuff off your hands, but the wandering merchant here a) is not guaranteed to appear, b) only does so just outside the whole dungeon, obviously, and c) only accepts the very rare silver coins(having enough lets you buy a potion of full life, full sanity, or the equivalent to Phoenix Down). It would be cool if there was some way to get rid of such unwanted items, even if without gain, especially since solving this problem would help to solve another: there’s precious little available equipment in the first place, and it’s not very fun either. Even within the confines of low fantasy, you can still find a good number of perfectly real-world and distinct armor designs (weapons are trickier, because of combat animations involved.) However, without ways of getting rid of useless stuff, it would just clog up the inventory even more.

Now is the time for one of Fear and Hunger’s most distinctive elements, the “strategic dismemberment system.” This means that during combat, you generally get a choice between a conventional attack on the enemy’s torso, striking either of two arms/legs, typically outright cutting off the former and crippling the latter, hitting the head for a low-hit-chance insta-kill, and often the ability to target crotch/groin area. Different body parts have their different attacks: the Prison Guard for instance, a tough enemy you’ll encounter practically everywhere, can cut off limbs with the cleaver in his weapon arm on any turn, and starting from the second turn he’ll attempt to do the coin-toss insta-kill with his free arm and will have a chance of a “stinger” attack. If/once both are gone, he’ll keep tackling with his body. This all sounds cool, if often disturbing, and in fact it often does work well. However, there are still more than enough kinks to work out. First and foremost, the fact that body parts are currently completely independent from each other more often than not can lead to some…interesting situations. At worst it’ll look like this:



Yes, somehow, fully destroying enemy’s torso and head still allows their disembodied arm to attack and hit accurately in that turn. Whatever is the code for everything dying once head/torso goes, it needs to be implemented everywhere fast. Same happens with Maneba enemies. You can kill their head on the first turn, and all the 7 (!) tentacles will still try to get at you for that turn. This MAY have been done intentionally, as insta-killing head on first turn is not difficult, but they do not even appear to get an accuracy reduction or anything like that. There are also other legitimate bugs associated with them, like the fact it’s possible for them to not actually die on-map after you defeat them, causing you to get stuck in an endless loop of pointless battles. Normally, you can try to escape (with a chance of failure, of course) but here this is bugged too, because getting hit by their tentacles once gives you entangled status effect…which DOESN’T disappear once you actually defeat them. Hence, you are truly stuck in an endless loop, even if there are no more tentacles anymore:



Another example of this (possibly NSFW):



These are the glaring problems, but there are others that are less apparent but seem to against realism and common sense just as much. For instance, your character having a limb cut off doesn’t just permanently (bar one edge case) disfigure them but also causes them to start bleeding, which makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that the enemies who get their limbs cut off are all exempt from this. Then, there’s the matter of leg attacks being nearly always useless. Prison Guards, for instance, only go “off-balance” if both are cut (one is apparently fine) and they can STILL tackle somehow with them both gone, and inflicting the same heavy damage. Other enemies seem similar. Well, skeletons do get to kick with one (?) of their legs, but this brings up another question: why do so many of your enemies get to effectively attack multiple times a turn through different body parts, but neither you nor allies (some directly controlled, some under AI’s hand) can do the same? I can make an exception for the clearly superhuman Prison Guards and the like, but why are enemy Ghouls and Skeletons, so much more effective than your own, who look EXACTLY the same? While your Ghoul claws once with some inconsistent damage, the enemy one can strike with each arm for 10 and then bite for ~20, while skeletons get to both punch and kick.

That’s about all there’s for strategic dismemberment. There’s obviously item use, though low-fantasy and scarce resources again means there isn’t too much stuff. Nevertheless, you do have enormously useful Explosive Vials and the surprisingly-useful Stones (available from Mines onwards, and great at stunning) so never forget about these. Dismemberment system is so fascinating, conventional skills were deemed superfluous; opening that tab instead gives you the option to run away, and Necromancy powers (if you are Dark Mage, or sacrificed enough to obtain them) which consume Sanity (and about the only thing that could cause you to have troubles with it, outside of a couple optional bosses.) Most interesting, however, is “Talk”, available only to the main character. It literally allows you to spend a turn in an attempt to converse instead of attacking, asking questions that are normally preset (“Where are you from?” “We don’t need to fight!” “Please don’t!” “Prepare to Die!”), but sometimes differ significantly. It’s usually only worth trying it at length if available options differ from those four; otherwise, the enemy is unlikely to be persuaded into anything useful, though if you already decided your run is doomed, getting some potentially entertaining and/or informative replies may well be worth it. I would only again complain that it’s a little unfair when enemies still get a free hit if they respond to your conversation. It’s one thing when they simply step back to swing at you even harder; but when you spend a turn to ask Dark Priest which gods he serves, he gives a multi-sentence reply and then STILL finds the time to strike you with his lantern, it’s weird at best.



Though probably not as weird as giving a considered response while missing both arms, like Monty Python's Black Knight.

To wrap it up, here’s a rundown on the available classes. You have Mercenary, Dark Priest, Knight and Outlander. I spent ~95% of my time with the game with Outlander, having read that he’s from the north and deciding he would be close to the Valkyrie I guided to ascension in NetHack. Eventually, I found out Knight was the true Valkyrie counterpart, being the only female playable character, and, like Valkyrie, being an armored brick, with the best armor and weapon in the game, and lacking anything else unique to balance that. Outlander is more of a merge between NetHack’s Caveman and Ranger, possessing mediocre fur armor, being able to devour corpses, and starting with a bow that can be used to shoot Iron Arrows on-map – a resource-constrained (you start with 5, and rarely, if ever, get more), yet useful way of ensuring particularly annoying enemies are short of a few limbs by the time melee starts. Dark Priest has his default Necromancy, balanced by the useless robe he wears and mediocre short sword (which I think does exact same damage as a bow in-combat). Mercenary has the same short sword, but also a decent leather armor, a skinning knife (used to craft armours from dead enemies; not that useful since you find a guaranteed one pretty early anyway) and the considerably more useful ability to pick locks without wasting keys or Red Vials.

These are the differences, but there are almost more similarities between them – including that they all have 100 Health, Sanity and Hunger. While other stats may differ, equipment appears to alter them far more anyway. Since we are talking about Sanity, I’ll note it’s currently weird at best – pretty much the ONLY thing that seems to affect it besides engaging in Necromancy or encountering certain minibosses is the light level. Being in the dark slowly ticks down Sanity; encountering all the piles of corpses and other such sights seems to only matter if your character was unlucky enough to get Thanatophobia at start, which I always avoided meaning my characters all marched past mountains of corpses and corridors of viscera with their sanity going down by perhaps 3 points, all from the darkness alone. Again, why should I take any of that seriously if even the characters do not?

Conclusion



What I believe to be the end of currently available stuff, with the chained-up person apparently being key for the story of all four playable characters.

So, that’s Fear & Hunger as it is right now. For all I have said about it, it’s still one of the most unusual games on here, and provides a pretty unique experience for all its jank and overblown grimdark silliness. I certainly hope such things will get ironed out soon enough. It then still won’t be the game I would recommend to many, but is likely to become an all-time choice for the few who are looking for this kind of experience.