Manages to make a dungeon of just a few small areas feel immense by knowing its own language. Reduce the visible area, put enemies that, even if scarce, always pose a game ending risk if approached without care, make the environment interactive in unpredictable ways by always randomizing the looting results and do not even take for granted that saving the game is a safe action. Each incursion from each load (or from the very beginning) feels like an expedition, similar to something like the first Dragon Quest or the first Resident Evil. Voyages where, even if ending up in death, discovery is enough reason to push a little further in.

Even knowing that the game has become known because of its harsh aspects, perhaps what lacks the most is a more unforgiving commitment to punishment (later in added higher difficulties seem to approve). Fear & Hunger asks you to use everything to your advantage, and finding exploits fits as another piece of the game. But, while a really robust game will make the exploits’ exploration look like another foreseen step of the process, some of the shortcuts to ease your travels through this dungeon are more akin to permanent uninteresting rewards for finally figuring out, or exploring enough, to break a layer on the asphyxiating design. The decision to have saved games at all also incentives to push your unlimited chances like playing roulette in certain situations, betraying some of the most interesting elements of the proposal, like the threatening unknown atmosphere and the idea of improvising against upcoming surprises. Risks should stay risks instead of retries of luck.

Even if I wish the game could press harder, or smarter, its initial hours of discovery and commitment to an open mysterious exploration are more than enough to construct a dungeon with enough presence of its own. And it also may be the game with the highest amount of handmade d