Fear & Hunger: The Ogre Problem
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? The unstoppable force cuts the immovable object's penis off.
Stinger, excuse me.
It’s only been a short amount of time, 3.6 hours according to Steam, but already Fear & Hunger has become a staple of my videogame diet in no small part because the game is relentlessly punishing, and also because its visual aesthetic is, to me, akin to a candy bar. No matter how many bites I take, every one is sweet, satisfying, and I want another one as soon as I’m done. Years of watching Silent Hill playthroughs, my puberty spent reading Stephen King novels, disappearing into the paintings and writing of Clive Barker, and currently reading through the manga series Berserk, Fear & Hunger is perfect compliment to the horror and dark fantasy I typically relish in consuming, reading, and playing.
Which is exactly why this essay needs to be about the element of the game I find the most frustrating.
Ogres.
Technically they are called “Guards,” but they’re also large ogres with penises that sting the player. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Fear & Hunger is a role-playing-game(RPG), immersive-sim, and survival horror game. The story follows four characters (a knight, a dark priest, a barbarian, and a mercenary) who have arrived in the fictional country of Rondon and stand before a notorious castle and dungeon known as Fear & Hunger. Despite the rumors of unnatural events which transpire in this place, the character enters seeking a Knight by the name of Le’garde who entered the dungeon some time ago and seemingly disappeared. Upon entering the castle the player begins to steadily lose their sanity and become panged with hunger (hence the title), and while these gauges are steadily dwindling the player will also encounter a host of monsters ranging from armored lizard men, the castle’s torturer, floating jellyfish monsters, zombies, dark priests, a human hydra, wild dogs, and of course the Guards.
In his video about Fear & Hunger titled “The Cruelest Video Game,”, YouTuber Silver Eyepatch Wolf observed that the game is arguably as much an immersive sim as it is an RPG and Survival Horror, meaning that the way to interact with its elements and overcome certain obstacles is not always limited to fights. If we take a game like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger the game will throw monsters and other enemy-npcs at the player, and unless it is part of the larger narrative the player usually only has one way to overcome this obstacle: they have to fight. They can technically also run away but that’s not important. What is important is that combat is the primary way to progress in the story as well as to become strong enough to overcome obstacles.
Games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, South Park: the Stick of Truth, or Octopath Traveler encourage what is known as “grinding,” a slang term for steadily leveling up by regularly fighting enemies. Leveling up comes with in game perks like new moves, higher hit-points(hp), increasing proficiency with weapons, etc.
Fear & Hunger offers none of this.
Fear & Hunger doesn’t encourage fights. That’s because in Fear & Hunger you often don’t win fights, you are trying to survive them.
This of course leads back to the Ogre problem.
As I explore the dungeons and halls of the castle Fear & Hunger I will encounter several of the monsters and creatures previously described, but in the initial levels the enemy I’m most likely to encounter are the guards. These grotesque monsters will see me, which responds in a dramatic piano key drop and a yellow bubble forming above their heads with a punctuation point. Once this triggers they will begin to follow me. If I have the skill “dash” then I will be able to outrun them, but so far I have yet to learn this trick. That means I find myself fighting a lot of guards.
The ogres are, according to the lore of Fear & Hunger, former human jailers who’ve been twisted and tortured by the darkness of the dungeons. They’re naked except leather straps across their chest, and short leather skirts where their stingers (penises) dangle to the floor by their feet. Their bodies are massive (I believe the term is swol) and in one arm they carry a large rectangular meat clever that resembles something an Uruk-Hai would carry on his hip. This weapon is a nightmare if you do not immediately sever the creature’s left arm.
I forgot to mention this. Fear & Hunger’s combat mechanics are built around limb-dismemberment; your goal is to attack the different sections of an enemy npc’s body. You can try to attack the head, but depending on which character you chose this may be impossible and you’ll wind up missing attacks which gives your enemy more opportunity to strike at you thus draining your hit points quickly.
If you do not cut off the ogre’s arm holding the cleaver they will literally cut off one of your arms or legs.
And there’s no recovery from that. If you lose an arm it’s gone for good.
The right arm can be just as much of an issue because if you do not cut it off just as quickly the ogre will trigger a coin toss. Throughout Fear & Hunger the player will encounter this option for a coin toss, whether it’s searching bookshelves, opening chests, or even walking across a part of the floor. If I choose heads and wind up with tails, at least in an ogre fight, the creature will scream and begin to pummel me until my character passes out. When I wake up, my legs are gone and I am in a basement filled with rotting corpses, enough to literally cover the floor, and I have to drag myself through this gore nest until I encounter another enemy that will almost certainly kill me, or if I’m “lucky” I manage to go unnoticed.
But being real, the first one always happens whenever I’ve played the game.
A lizardman found me and I got to enjoy a cutscene of watching that monster literally rip my skin off before I had to crawl a few feet and die.
I haven’t progressed very far in Fear & Hunger, or at least, not as far as I would like. I haven’t even found Le’garde yet and I’ve played the game for at least 4 hours in total and started at least somewhere around 20 times. And this is due almost entirely to ogres, hence the title of this essay (though the title is also honestly a little fan-service/plagiarism from Silver EyePatch Wolf’s video who uses this phrase (love you John!)). Everytime I begin to approach a new hallway, or find a new route to a section of the castle an ogre seems to appear from nowhere, charge at me, leave me battered and broken, or worst of all, scrambling to use my healing items so that the rest of my run is not a total nightmare.
Were it not for the Crow-Mauler, I’d argue the ogres embody the aesthetic experience of the game like Imps in Doom or Goombas in Super Mario Bros.
And in fact, I think I’ll do that.
Or at least a little.
Looking at the ogres from a simple design perspective they are the enemy that the player is probably going to encounter the most of in their early run of the game, especially since ogres can be found on nearly every level of the dungeon and castle and only cease to be an issue as the player delves deeper into the forgotten city. Enemy npcs that recur frequently like this are not just a design tool to save on the cost of having to generate endless original opponents. That’s almost certainly one factor why videogames have developed the way they have, but not the only reason. Like any good work of art Fear & Hunger is trying to establish an aesthetic and atmosphere for the player and familiarity, or pattern recognition, is how a human being begins to understand their reality. Fear & Hunger’s plays with insanity and darkness for narrative purposes, and there’s enough randomly occurring elements that the player is never allowed to drift into a totally comfortable state while playing.
The ogre’s can be frustrating, but they never become a challenge to overcome or ignore.
Looking at an enemy like the Iron Shakespeare can provide an excellent comparison. Unless the player has acquired excellent gear, and has a full party, tackling that enemy is not difficult, it's next to impossible. An ogre on the other hand can be defeated by a player on their own and without a full set or armor.
Unless you’re the Dark priest, but that’s an essay unto itself.
I wrote about Imps and Goombas in Doom and Super Mario Bros in a previous essay, trying to observe how their number really reveals them as a design to impede movement. Both Doom and Super Mario Bros are about moving through a digital space trying to reach an end goal. The way an Imp impedes my path while attacking me is not that different from the Ogres. Both npcs are trying to prevent me from moving, and this is important for Fear & Hunger’s long game because in Fear & Hunger standing still lets the darkness sink in.
The longer my character remains in place the faster my mind and hunger gauge will drain to zero.
And that is when bigger problems can happen.
Exploration is the first “verb” of Fear & Hunger (I’m using terminology borrowed/stolen from game critic/designer Tim Rogers here) because it’s only by exploring the various crates that one will find items like food, weapons, books, etc. It’s by exploring that the character will steadily learn the lore and religion/mythology which plays a crucial component of the later game. It’s by exploring the dungeons that the player will eventually find the lost knight LeGarde which kicks off the next portion of the game. This is all a way of saying that in order to simply play the game exploring the dungeons is where a player will start.
Ogres exist to prevent further movement, and also disrupt exploration.
There are numerous ways to get around the Ogre problem, but I will leave that up to the reader who decides to tackle the game for themselves. This is partly to spare my word count, and also because one of the greatest joys of Fear & Hunger as a game is learning and experimenting with its system. There’s no end to the possibilities on how a player can get past these brutes to explore the deeper and darker regions of the dungeons, and by the time they stumble across the monstrosities like the Harvestmen, the white angel, or the Crow-Mauler (*shudders*) they will have far more to worry about than whether the stinger is still “throbbing” at them.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
12.11.2023
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