fear and hunger in las vegas
Jun. 6th, 2023 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
layzneri've really been fucking slacking on writing anything recently. and drawing. i am real tired after work and errands and upset with any creative output. so, let me put down half-baked shower thoughts from yesterday.
this is a draft. this is not finished. i will work on it later when i am not half asleep.
since this is going to be some ramblings on fear and hunger (video game) i am kindly asking any minors to click off
i was going to preface this with an attempt to say something intellectual but i don't want to give off the air of a pathetic youtube video essayist so i will simply get to the point. i've spent about 20 hours playing fear and hunger and surely i have not even remotely reached 40% of its content. reviews do not tell lies, the rng will generally ruin you and leave you starving and crippled. very rarely, it will reward you quite generously and leave you with a rush of euphoria. i can admit that most of the hours i put into it were from trying, over and over again to get good rng for a set of items to progress without dying.
it may be a turnoff to many players, but fear and hunger leaves you with little direction, just the motivation of frustration to keep you marching along. i'd compare it to games like baroque and garage, in which you are thrown into frustrating mechanics in which you are forced to try, over and over, to properly acclimate yourself in a grungy, hostile world. it becomes mind numbing. but unlike garage, i don't think the environment becomes any more comfortable through each playthrough. you receive wisdom, but the pit in your stomach doesn't go away. well, that's the point.
i think fear and hunger definitely does a great job of portraying its environment. the courtyard you start off in that is already infested by hungry scavengers becomes an oasis in comparison to the dingy and stygian dungeons you are forced to traverse. none of the player characters are plain and sensible, everyone presented is haunted by some kind of force. cahara, our beloved mercenary, is sickly and green-looking, a crude thief who can, if given the option in the starting screens, can come back with crabs and a hollow will to go on. despite his promiscuous and unreliable behavior, he's a nice guy and just trying to provide for his girlfriend and child who may not even be his. d'arce, our sort of caricature of joan of arc, is initially portrayed as a nice and fair knight, following her beloved leader. raised under the cruelty of the church and experiencing all kinds of abuse, d'arce is supposed to have come out stronger, through the art of gladiatorship and knighthood. however, she spits out the same crusader rhetoric. enki is another sickly dark mage trained in the art of bloodshed and simply aimed to seek higher knowledge because the martyrs-adjacent practices simply weren't enough for him. while gangly and irreversibly changed from his magical practices and familial sacrifice, he seems to be one of the more normal, simply caring only about his studies. our last protagonist, ragnvaldr, is our outlander, who again on the surface seems to be normal but carries an intense and justified vengeance (and also probably a lot of parasites from all those dead bodies he's eating). nobody from our cast of characters is conventionally attractive: a greyish deathly pallor, bulging and pathetic doe eyes, ears that jut out, and the impression of skull underneath skin, for you don't need something like that in a land like this.
fear and hunger is cruel (but such is life), and everything around you doesn't mind sticking you with parasites, tearing your limbs off, sodomizing you, or skinning you. you're always provided with the faint hope of survival in death, dragging yourself by a single limb, or crawling on the floor with your skin peeled off despite the agonizing pain. or perhaps after losing all of your limbs, you think you can hold on, but there's nothing to propel you forward, the game decides you must quit.
wip wip wip
this is a draft. this is not finished. i will work on it later when i am not half asleep.
since this is going to be some ramblings on fear and hunger (video game) i am kindly asking any minors to click off
i was going to preface this with an attempt to say something intellectual but i don't want to give off the air of a pathetic youtube video essayist so i will simply get to the point. i've spent about 20 hours playing fear and hunger and surely i have not even remotely reached 40% of its content. reviews do not tell lies, the rng will generally ruin you and leave you starving and crippled. very rarely, it will reward you quite generously and leave you with a rush of euphoria. i can admit that most of the hours i put into it were from trying, over and over again to get good rng for a set of items to progress without dying.
it may be a turnoff to many players, but fear and hunger leaves you with little direction, just the motivation of frustration to keep you marching along. i'd compare it to games like baroque and garage, in which you are thrown into frustrating mechanics in which you are forced to try, over and over, to properly acclimate yourself in a grungy, hostile world. it becomes mind numbing. but unlike garage, i don't think the environment becomes any more comfortable through each playthrough. you receive wisdom, but the pit in your stomach doesn't go away. well, that's the point.
i think fear and hunger definitely does a great job of portraying its environment. the courtyard you start off in that is already infested by hungry scavengers becomes an oasis in comparison to the dingy and stygian dungeons you are forced to traverse. none of the player characters are plain and sensible, everyone presented is haunted by some kind of force. cahara, our beloved mercenary, is sickly and green-looking, a crude thief who can, if given the option in the starting screens, can come back with crabs and a hollow will to go on. despite his promiscuous and unreliable behavior, he's a nice guy and just trying to provide for his girlfriend and child who may not even be his. d'arce, our sort of caricature of joan of arc, is initially portrayed as a nice and fair knight, following her beloved leader. raised under the cruelty of the church and experiencing all kinds of abuse, d'arce is supposed to have come out stronger, through the art of gladiatorship and knighthood. however, she spits out the same crusader rhetoric. enki is another sickly dark mage trained in the art of bloodshed and simply aimed to seek higher knowledge because the martyrs-adjacent practices simply weren't enough for him. while gangly and irreversibly changed from his magical practices and familial sacrifice, he seems to be one of the more normal, simply caring only about his studies. our last protagonist, ragnvaldr, is our outlander, who again on the surface seems to be normal but carries an intense and justified vengeance (and also probably a lot of parasites from all those dead bodies he's eating). nobody from our cast of characters is conventionally attractive: a greyish deathly pallor, bulging and pathetic doe eyes, ears that jut out, and the impression of skull underneath skin, for you don't need something like that in a land like this.
fear and hunger is cruel (but such is life), and everything around you doesn't mind sticking you with parasites, tearing your limbs off, sodomizing you, or skinning you. you're always provided with the faint hope of survival in death, dragging yourself by a single limb, or crawling on the floor with your skin peeled off despite the agonizing pain. or perhaps after losing all of your limbs, you think you can hold on, but there's nothing to propel you forward, the game decides you must quit.
wip wip wip
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