The Haunted Hoard: Hungry Horrors (PC)
Before movies and games became the main source of horrors, it was folk tales that made us afraid to go out in the dark. While some of the mythical creatures of the past can seem a little quaint to our modern society, if they were all driven mad with hunger, it’s a bit easier to see why you might be terrified of the monsters from old folklore. Hungry Horrors, despite its name, isn’t trying to really make its monsters from Irish and British folklore legitimately scary, but in this cartoonish rogue-like deckbuilder, you will get to battle them not through weaponry, but by trying to fill their stomachs with traditional meals from the British Isles before they choose to fill their guts with you instead.
Hungry Horrors sees a spoiled princess awake with no servants to see to her needs and nothing but a talking cat named Lady Catherine to help her as the kingdom is overrun with monsters turned ravenous by a curse. With no prince to save her or knight to protect her, the princess instead takes up a magical cauldron as her weapon of choice, looking to quell the hungers of the folkloric creatures before they can reach her and scarf her down. However, she isn’t exactly much of a cook at first either, needing to learn recipes over time in the game’s campaign mode and unfortunately, it won’t quite prove to be enough to survive unscathed. The princess will inevitably meet her end eventually, whether because a monster managed to approach her and make her a meal or because their attacks reduced her stamina to zero instead. However, you’ll revive back at the castle, able to regroup, upgrade, make a new batch of dishes, and head out back into the wilderness to feed the horrors and work your way towards ending the curse so the princess can go back to living her pampered life of luxury.
The princess, at first, is a selfish sort but in a silly way, complaining that she’s the one who has to step up and do the work and agonizing over how her prince hasn’t come to do to the work. She can be a bit bristly with people who mean well though, but while it might take her a while to become a more rounded character, by the time you near the end you can see some of the amusing parts of her personality still but with a better outlook so it won’t be her whining the whole adventure. The campaign mode is fairly meaty even if you do particularly well at it, but there is some progression baked into it that makes deaths a bit less disheartening. Starting out, your recipes will be food that doesn’t fill the bellies of the horrors much, and while you can find seasonings to increase their potency and even add extra effects to them in the turn-based battles, the deck you build full of dishes will likely be in need of a cull as you unlock more recipes and can make more inherently filling and flexible dishes. Deck size is a concern as well, too many cards making it hard to get what you need to play into the game’s main form of effective play: craving chains.
When you encounter a monster, you’ll draw a few dishes from your deck and need to get to work setting up a sequence of dishes that will play to their cravings. Every dish comes with a clearly indicated and color-coded flavor, be it Bitter, Sour, Salty, Sweet, or Savory. Feed a monster’s craving, and you’ll earn bonus points for sating its hunger based on every previous dish it ate in an unbroken chain. However, the food you feed the beast will also inspire a new craving, a good deck needing to be able to have enough food to sate cravings but also inspire new desires that let chains go on for incredibly long periods. Break a chain and you’ll have to start over that battle and this can definitely doom you as you get to later foes, but there are elements in place to make it more manageable. You can discard a card to draw a new one, two discards being free whereas others start drawing on more and more health during the battle to perform. Your discard pile will shuffle back into the deck eventually so dishes don’t disappear for good, and over time you can acquire potions that can be used as a way to tip things in your favor if you have no other options. You can use a potion to change a craving, give yourself more safe discards, heal up or give you a damage shield, and many other functions that mean you can gather a buffer against the luck of the draw, but there’s also another element you need to consider about each monster.
Monsters have likes and dislikes, and in campaign mode, you won’t know what these are until you’ve fed them a dish. If they like it, the food neatly fits into the chain and quells the hunger the amount you expect. If they dislike it, it won’t harm the chain, but the food itself provides no points while the craving combo instead provides whatever value it should. If the monster loves it, the food counts for triple value… but if they hate it, the chain is over, they spit up a good amount of food to undo a lot of the hunger you had sated, and you’re back to the start of a new chain. A hated dish can devastate you if it happens at a bad time, but it adds a new layer to how you approach feeding foes too. Any unknown quantity is a risk, but you can also get dishes that are Hard to Hate so they can be safe bets, you can make ones that force a monster to automatically like the next meal no matter what it is, and potions can sometimes undo the damage of a hated dish as well. You have a good amount of strategic control and reserves like the potions to help keep a hated dish from being an inevitable death, but the possibility of one keeps tension alive even as you start getting more powerful meals with extra effects since they can throw off even expertly crafted dish decks a bit.
The monsters you face can have a range of creative attacks to play into the food theming and deck-building aspects. A creature may splatter you with ink, making some cards impossible to read but if you remember what they are, you can still play them. One boss monster has seagulls flying nearby that will snatch up meals if they’re made from certain ingredients, although at least they’ll stay gone so you can spend turns baiting them with weaker dishes. Some may add cards to your deck to make it more likely you draw something dangerous or useless or they may even spoil a dish so it provides no hunger value but can still be used for other functions, such as the fact the princess can actually heal herself by scarfing down a meal and potentially even gaining bonus effects for doing so. A creature can kill you in two ways though, either by simply dealing enough damage with its attacks that your stamina runs out, or gradually approaching the princess and triggering a uniquely animated death scene.
Hungry Horrors has over 30 creatures from folklore of the British Isles, and almost all of them have a special animation if they manage to approach you during battle. With the game’s cartoon pixel art, these won’t ever too be gnarly, a good deal of them involving the princess being eaten whole while perhaps the most violent ones being ones where she is immediately rendered a skeleton instead of actually bleeding or being dismembered. Many of them are more comedic or strange, like the large beaver monster Afanc turning you into a log to suit its taste or the Clurichaun drinking the princess under the table instead. The Hall of Vanquish even incentivizes you to collect deaths, although you do lose your entire deck when you do so as well as other things like the Cookware trinkets that give passive boosts or the spices that lightly increase the strength of meals made with certain ingredients. However, the titular Hungry Horrors are definitely the stars of the adventure, a fascination arising from seeing what creatures may lie ahead as you head to new areas like a cave, forest, a loch, or even near Stonehenge.
For fans of British and Irish folklore, you can expect to see some familiar faces. While the game isn’t shy to hint at the expected dragon, a good deal of Hungry Horrors pulls from creatures the general public might not be so aware of. Some better known monsters like the Dullahan, Banshee, and Cockatrice pop up, and even people with a deeper folkloric interest won’t be shocked to see the fleshy man fused with a horse called the Nuckelavee or the river hag Jenny Greenteeth, but there are some very specific and delightful surprises like the three headed dragonling Ellen Trechend or the personification of the Yellow Plague, Y Fad Fellen. Seeing what creatures lie ahead and knowing they have appropriate attacks to match their myths as well as a unique kill animation and some lore to read later makes each encounter more exciting, and it’s hardly the only part of Hungry Horrors that leans into being a wonderful representation of the cultural history of the British Isles. Characters you meet come from stories and historical events, dreams you can trigger in a special room for bonuses involve the princess participating in local traditions, and the food itself is comprised entirely from meals native to the region as well. Again, you can expect ones most everyone knows like Scones or Haggis, more specific ones like Jellied Eels and Cornish Pasties, and then less known dishes like Stargazy Pie, Angels on Horseback, and Rumbledethumps. With notes on where these dishes were popular and even how they’re made, Hungry Horrors really puts the extra effort into making this a loving tribute to a region’s history with an infectious enthusiasm but also material impacts on the gameplay as their lore can provide direction for impactful mechanical elements for the food flinging action.
Exploring areas in Hungry Horrors lets you often slightly pick your path through a somewhat randomized set of rooms, the player able to pick what kind of reward they’ll get for clearing out the monster ahead or getting to stop in at special places like the sleeping nooks mentioned earlier or a vendor to buy useful cards and resources. Recipes won’t be forgotten and ingredients are retained and refilled somewhat after a death, and there’s also the Scrolls of Taliesin that can go towards lasting upgrades that can increase the chances of the next attempt being successful. There are sidequests that are handled a little strangely, the player needing to first encounter the character giving them and receive a request before then having to go back through that area after beating it to provide the item the boss dropped for your reward. Considering you’ll be able to build up more resources though, it’s not too rough to repeat a place you beat to do the turn in and you’ll be more prepared for the next area after the quick diversion.
There is, however, another mode called Banquet that plays closer to a traditional rogue-like. You’ll experience a shorter run, likely to take around an hour, where you start from the very beginning and need to build up your power faster without dying. Death will wipe out anything you acquire in Banquet mode, but the rewards are more plentiful to accommodate it, Scrolls can be spent during the run instead of between runs, and you ride the line a lot more as you need to adjust a single consistent deck over the whole journey rather than being sent back to the castle to cook new dishes to replace weaker outdated ones. Coming in a range of difficulties and with different “princesses” who have varying effects on how things play like the player getting random recipes, it is a little bit of a shame they must be unlocked linearly rather than having a bit more room to pick which princess type you play as, but it does give the game some extra longevity beyond attempting the more difficult Spicy version of the main campaign. Banquet does feel appropriately tinkered with to keep monsters potent but not overbearing considering your weaker resources and less of a margin for error, the game even making likes and dislikes immediately apparent so a hated dish won’t just immediately ruin a run. There are also other modifiers to play with like enabling a mode on top of everything where every dish served is permanently lost, Hungry Horrors robust and meaningfully replayable while also having that well built campaign for those who might just want a singular well-structured journey rather than a game to return to again and again.
THE VERDICT: A fun cartoon look and an infectious adoration for the folklore and history of the British Isles make Hungry Horrors an appealing adventure before you even factor in a wonderfully crafted deck-building battle system. Building up massive craving combos makes for a consistently satisfying way to deal damage, the meals you cook can be customized into powerful tools in battle, but the monsters still remain potent because of a range of unique and creative attacks. In its campaign and more traditional rogue-like mode you see a game that can give you a range of options for strategizing and luck mitigating without ruining its difficulty, all while dishing out delicious helpings of regional legends and cuisine.
And so, I give Hungry Horrors for PC…
A GREAT rating. Hungry Horrors didn’t need its loving representation of mythical creatures, traditional dishes, and regional history to be an enjoyable game, but it certainly adds an extra layer of appreciation to an excellent turn-based battler. The creatures clearly encouraged a good deal of creativity even outside the of the short vanquishing animations, the range of attacks making it so that battles don’t stagnate as your deck faces new disruptions to the satisfying combo chain building process. The foods being varied also clearly encouraged the range of special effects they can have to broaden as well, a meal not just an aesthetic element since it can come with clear recognizable impacts on the fight but also be upgraded so you can further hone it into a unique useful tool in your deck. It can be a little disheartening when a powerfully crafted selection of dishes is lost on your demise, but oftentimes you can cook yourself back to an effective if different deck so that the card wipes aren’t just there for difficulty. You’ll be getting a dash of variety as you push into new areas of the campaign and unlock other elements or gather resources like potions to make the main adventure more manageable but not too easy nor too difficult. The Banquet mode could use a little more freedom to play with its modes, but it also shows how expertly honed the systems can be both for keeping tension present even in battles you’re fairly certain you’ll win and for giving you some ways to make fun mixes that really tip the power balance in your favor for a while.
I haven’t played too many rogue-like deckbuilders, but Hungry Horrors gives me hope for finding even more exciting, creative, and mentally stimulating members of the genre. While I’d always likely have been charmed to some degree by its reverence for folklore and cultural history, Hungry Horrors nails its aesthetic direction while also having a layered but accessible design for its tactical food flinging battles, the deck-building a massive strength rather than an arbitrary element. Your cards can gradually feel like your preferred skill set, abilities that complement each other to make for the huge hits to a monster’s hunger that pay off all the thought you put into play while the luck elements keep things engaging rather than sucker punching you with unfair twists. Hungry Horrors got all of its ingredients right and cooked up quite the wonderful video game experience.