Hunger is a deeply unfriendly extraction RPG

It really feels like the developers of Hunger don’t care if you like it or not. Built by developers who created Hell Let Loose, Hunger takes the ‘extraction’ genre to a fantasy Napoleonic setting (it’s apparently back in fashion right now) where flintlock pistols face off against unspeakable zombie horrors that have ravaged the world. Unlike a lot of games that strive to be as user-friendly as possible, Hunger goes for extreme friction that’s definitely going to frustrate a lot of players. That’s the charm of the game, it’s unpleasant, slow, awkward, and occasionally unfair. Hunger is immersive, and when the world it’s trying to immerse you in is cruel and unforgiving, the game has to be too.

For me, the first hurdle came as soon as I loaded up the game. Movement is slow and even the sprinting speed is on par with what I could do in real life if I was carrying a rifle and a sword and a backpack full of cheap wine rather than the superhuman speeds of Call of Duty or Marathon. When I came across my first enemy, a simple shambling zombie that lurched towards me, I pulled up my pistol and… nothing. It wasn’t loaded. Loading a firearm in Hunger isn’t as simple as ejecting a magazine and slapping a new one in — this is a flintlock pistol, so the process involves opening up the barrel, pouring some gunpowder in, closing it up, putting a bit more gunpowder in the end of the barrel, dropping a single shot in, pulling out a ramrod, shoving that down the barrel, placing the ramrod back in its little holder, and then pulling back the hammer. That’s all for one single shot. If you miss, you need to do it all over again. While a zombie is trying to rip your face off.

My tribulations didn’t end with a zombie finally dispatched by a well-placed lead ball to the dome. The sound from the shot was deafeningly loud and attracted every monster in the village. Giving up on my pistol, I switched to a longsword which could decapitate enemies with a single swing. A few seconds later I was standing on a pile of freshly deanimated corpses with no armour left and very little health. Some of the enemies explode when you kill them, others can take off nearly all your health in one hit – survival was costly. Without armour plates or abilities to repair with, I had to use some rusty tongs to straighten out my armour one kink at a time, and it took forever. Restoring my health involved huffing about twenty little ampoules of smelling salts individually until I was so off my face I could ignore the heavy bloody loss.

Then it was time to loot. Looting in Hunger is also a massive pain and exercise in frustration. Every container I opened, whether that’s the possessions of an enemy or a food basket in a cellar, had to be searched through one item at a time. I felt sheer rage bubbling away while items revealed themselves to be rotten eggs or literal jars of piss, when all I needed was a bit of flour for a quest. All the time I was scrabbling through boxes of useless junk I could hear more of the hunger (that’s the collective name for the creatures in the game) lurching around in buildings near me. Eventually I found my twenty ambiguous units of flour and got to an exfil, having to wait thirty seconds before a hot-air balloon that was already there would deign to accept me on board. 

Once I got back to the social hub area it didn’t get any better, as to interact with my stash I had to physically go speak to a little Napoleon-looking fellow, but to sell my junk I had to go chat with a man seemingly made of metal prosthetics. Every step of the way there was an obstacle, every little interaction caused just a little bit of frustration.

It all came together and clicked for me when I joined my first game in a group with some friends. We headed into the start map to do the starter quest, and while we were slowly looting the camp we had been sent to find, I was shot in the back. This was our first taste of PvP.