Ravenous Devils is a short Victorian era management game that has an interesting menu of concepts, mixed presentation and overall lacks in substance. You play as Percival and Hildred, a cannibalistic couple who arrive in London to open a business in tailoring and serving meat dishes. The interesting twist is that all of the meat and resources used to make the food and articles of clothing are recycled from the corpses of customers that the couple murder.
Dressing a management game in these horror-adjacent themes is a huge credit to the developers as it makes for an exciting concept. Unfortunately, as you dig deeper into this game, it is dressed with a weak narrative and an easy to crack gameplay loop and does little to add challenge or subversion. As you earn money, the couple can upgrade the establishment, some upgrades offer quality of life improvements but others just add further resources to balance. Despite the freedom of choice to progress how you want, I still found the game relatively easy, and once you get the rhythm down you become a pretty unstoppable force pumping out products at the rate of a factory.
I think the lack of challenge in the gameplay is a huge detriment to the experience. Despite the narrative highlighting the risk of external threats to the business and the fact you are literally killing customers in this establishment, this doesn’t come into the gameplay at all. I think this is a huge miss. Avoiding law enforcement and keeping customer suspicions low are concepts could have been introduced into the game to keep the gameplay loop fresh as the only threat to failure is due an error in the player’s engagement with the game rather than having a theoretical spanner thrown in the works.
Regarding it’s presentation, I think thematically the game does strike something good. It entirely embraces the gothic Victorian atmosphere. Whilst I do not like the cheap-looking assets used in the game, they are able to fully display some pretty graphic gore-filled animations. One that stands out to me is the preparation of meat steaks with the human corpses. Watching the breakdown of the human body into it’s fundamentals by Hildred caught me off guard the first time I saw it.
Ravenous Devils is unapologetic of leaning into these themes, this grants me a little favour towards the game, as it has dark humour and charming moments that kept me engaged with the experience. A final touch on the presentation was the voice acting, not my cup of tea personally. I found their voices were… too much and if you’re reading this having heard the performances I’m sure you can understand where I’m coming from.
As I mentioned, the narrative is extremely weak and feels like a detractor from the experience and I found myself wishing cutscenes away so I could get back to preparing the shop for the next day. However, I don’t think people play management games for the narrative and it’s inoffensive enough to where I don’t see it is a major negative, more-so a whimpering feature.
Conclusively, Ravenous Devils feels like a demo for a fantastic concept that could have been executed on a grander and more complex scale. For what it is, the game is enjoyable despite it’s simplicity and for the price I can’t recommend against it if you’re curious in any capacity. I hope the developers can someday tap-in to this reservoir once more to provide a more fleshed-out experience that better represents what they so clearly wanted to make.
Dressing a management game in these horror-adjacent themes is a huge credit to the developers as it makes for an exciting concept. Unfortunately, as you dig deeper into this game, it is dressed with a weak narrative and an easy to crack gameplay loop and does little to add challenge or subversion. As you earn money, the couple can upgrade the establishment, some upgrades offer quality of life improvements but others just add further resources to balance. Despite the freedom of choice to progress how you want, I still found the game relatively easy, and once you get the rhythm down you become a pretty unstoppable force pumping out products at the rate of a factory.
I think the lack of challenge in the gameplay is a huge detriment to the experience. Despite the narrative highlighting the risk of external threats to the business and the fact you are literally killing customers in this establishment, this doesn’t come into the gameplay at all. I think this is a huge miss. Avoiding law enforcement and keeping customer suspicions low are concepts could have been introduced into the game to keep the gameplay loop fresh as the only threat to failure is due an error in the player’s engagement with the game rather than having a theoretical spanner thrown in the works.
Regarding it’s presentation, I think thematically the game does strike something good. It entirely embraces the gothic Victorian atmosphere. Whilst I do not like the cheap-looking assets used in the game, they are able to fully display some pretty graphic gore-filled animations. One that stands out to me is the preparation of meat steaks with the human corpses. Watching the breakdown of the human body into it’s fundamentals by Hildred caught me off guard the first time I saw it.
Ravenous Devils is unapologetic of leaning into these themes, this grants me a little favour towards the game, as it has dark humour and charming moments that kept me engaged with the experience. A final touch on the presentation was the voice acting, not my cup of tea personally. I found their voices were… too much and if you’re reading this having heard the performances I’m sure you can understand where I’m coming from.
As I mentioned, the narrative is extremely weak and feels like a detractor from the experience and I found myself wishing cutscenes away so I could get back to preparing the shop for the next day. However, I don’t think people play management games for the narrative and it’s inoffensive enough to where I don’t see it is a major negative, more-so a whimpering feature.
Conclusively, Ravenous Devils feels like a demo for a fantastic concept that could have been executed on a grander and more complex scale. For what it is, the game is enjoyable despite it’s simplicity and for the price I can’t recommend against it if you’re curious in any capacity. I hope the developers can someday tap-in to this reservoir once more to provide a more fleshed-out experience that better represents what they so clearly wanted to make.