I got back into Fear & Hunger after delving into its lore a bit. My opinion of this game has lowered drastically once I started to think about the design of this game. In short, this game has two completely conflicting core design principles:
- Deliberate obtuseness, lack of tutorialization and explanation, and relying on the player discovering things for themselves
- Survival mechanics (the titular fear and hunger) with a finite amount of resources that can be discovered on each playthrough, and randomized drops.
It should be obvious why these conflict. You can't really have proper exploration while being essentially on a timer. The game's two core elements actively punish and reduce each other: if you explore, backtrack, and check out previous areas, you'll run out of resources very fast, forcing you to either push forward or ditch the entire playthrough to start a new one. If you beeline towards an objective, the survival mechanics and resource management become trivial and almost completely ignorable.
While I initially thought the idea of drops randomizing on each death seemed neat, I've come to realize that it's "fuck you" RNG of the very worst kind: runs can live and die on a single roll of the dice. Get infected without having a Cloth Fragment? Fuck you, off to a restart with you. In this game with such a punishing save system, restarting can sometimes mean having to redo like an hour's worth of progress. And not in the fun, roguelike way either: you're
literally just repeating the exact same steps again, with maybe some minor differences if you luck into a powerful drop (like the accessory that restores MP in combat). I've seen some people say that this game is supposed to be figured out over the course of multiple playthroughs, and not meant to be completed on your first, or even second run. Which might be fine if runs took maybe 2 hours max, but this is a deliberately slow-paced, methodical game where you're pushed to consider your choices carefully. A complete playthrough can take like 5-7 hours, and that is a shitton of time to be repeating the same steps over and over again across multiple playthroughs. The element of randomization is actually extremely minor, almost to the point of being totally meaningless.
But the most demoralizing realization was when I thought about the videos I'd watched about this game's many, many different endings and secret elements. Simply put, think of the way the Artorias DLC is accessed in Dark Souls 1, and now think discovering it was on a timer. That's what the secrets in this game are like. The conditions for each are
so obtuse, the hints given so general and vague, and the game world so big, that I cannot conceive of someone actually having fun trying to discover them by themselves. That's where using the wiki and the guides come in, and here we arrive at the most devastating conclusion I came to: that's not gameplay, that's just following instructions. It's no more interactive than constructing a miniature model. There's nothing immersive, organic or spontaneous about it. You're not exploring or discovering anything, you're just following tracks already laid out in front of you. That's where I not only stopped liking the game, but actively started being annoyed by it.
I will always appreciate this series for its incredible lore, uncompromising vision and excellent execution of Lovecraftian horror. But those are all things you can get from just watching youtube videos about it. Playing it boils down to either A) stumbling blindly through the game on a first playthrough, likely screwing yourself multiple times by things you had no way to prepare for or know about, or B) just going through the motions on further playthroughs, where all sense of immersion, danger or discovery is gone, replaced with rote repetition of things you've already seen.
