Fear and Hunger: My First Run 10.24.2023
For the last 5 months, I’ve wanted desperately to play a video game. I couldn’t, in no small part because I’m bad with computers, and because I decided to purchase a Macbook Pro several years ago. Apple, as I’m fond of saying, doesn’t like people having fun.
Because I’m an old Millenial, according to my girlfriend who’s an old Gen Z’er, I like watching YouTube videos about stuff I think is cool and one of my favorite channels is Silver Eyepatch Wolf, real name John Walsh, who regularly reviews Anime, Manga, Professional Wrestling, and of course videogames. I cannot say enough nice things about Silver Eyepatch Wolf and his channel without quickly spiraling from kiss-ass territory into creepy stalker, so I’ll just keep my adoration short by saying whether it was his video about the evolution of Sonic, the bizarre reality of Undertale and it’s fanbase, or possibly my favorite video “Why you should Play Silent Hill 2” Walsh is the dude of dudes and always leaves me with new ideas to consider.
And sometimes those ideas become obsessions. Case and point.
His video “The Cruelest Video Game” arrived in my subscriptions feed and I did what I usually do when he posts a new video: pump my fist, make some coffee, grab my drawing pens, and sit down to watch. 48 minutes and 37 seconds later I knew that I needed, not just wanted, to play Fear & Hunger.
But I don’t have a gaming PC; I have a Macbook, and Apple doesn’t like games (okay, not really, they just don’t like the games I want to play), so for the last five months I’ve been grinding my teeth, desperate to find a way to play the game.
Last night 10.24.2023, at 12:43 AM, I was playing around with the Steam app on my laptop. Some desperate (or mania-induced) part of my brain was fixated. Maybe I could get Steam to work. Maybe I could get Railroad Tycoon 3 to work. Or Stronghold Crusader. Or maybe even You Have 10 seconds. Somewhere in the haze of uninstalling the app again, creating a new password for the 50th time, and looking at my games, I noticed a new green button beneath the title of Fear & Hunger.
The word “Install” hovered on my screen, contained in a chartreuse box with white lettering.
I briefly wondered if perhaps the game had assumed some sentience, and the tortures it was accustomed to perform upon players might now be haunting me, torturing me.
I wanted to play the game.
I needed to play the game.
Fingers trembling, I clicked my mouse. And I waited.
At 12:45 AM, the game was downloaded. I braced myself for failure. My laptop was humming. It never makes noise. A pop-up emerged with a solid black screen. I waited there in that digital abyss for what felt like an eternity.
From the dark I heard a familiar knock, punctuated by a sickly violin. Fear & Hunger was on my screen, ready to be played. I couldn’t believe it. I had to go to bed so I could get enough sleep for work. I had a full shift tomorrow. There wasn’t time to play.
I pressed “New Game” and began the game at 12:46 AM. By 1:01 AM I was dead.
I plan to write more about Fear & Hunger, and a far more focused essay about the experience once I’ve played more than 10 minutes of the game. For now this short essay is more about communicating the emotion and intellectual reaction of what has been 5 months of pent up excitement, frustration, consideration, and finally a sort of victory. I believed, with no hyperbole in my voice, that I would never play this game due to technological limitations. Fear & Hunger is, as of this writing, not available on any console system, and while I briefly considered purchasing a Steam Deck, I don’t have $500 to spend on a handheld device when I already have a Nintendo Switch.
Fear & Hunger is many things, the primary being an immersive-sim as well as a survival horror game. Including visual elements and aesthetics from the work of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, the manga Berserk, the Silent Hill franchise and various other horror intellectual properties, the first game is set in late medieval Europe where the player is allowed to choose one of four characters to try and find the lost knight L'Garde who has entered the famous castle of Fear & Hunger and never reappeared.
For my quick playthrough I chose the “outlander” Ragnvaldr because I knew he had good offensive stats. That wasn’t going to be a good long-term strategy but I went into my run knowing I was going to die pretty quickly. And sure enough I did. I managed to fight two of the “Maneba” the floating jellyfish monsters, but as I walked past a hallway, almost leaping out of the dark at me was one of the Ogre guards, specifically the armored “Elite Guard” carrying a Morningstar in one hand, a blade in the other, and his penis “throbbing” at me, “stinger” sorry (but let’s be real it’s a giant penis). I managed to hit him twice before he brought the morningstar down on me and I collapsed.
The title Fear & Hunger greeted me, and the familiar knocking of failure rang true through my laptop’s speakers.
I laughed. I almost cried. I was extraordinarily happy to have failed so quickly at a game I had been dying to play for months.
Like I said, I plan on writing more about this game, if for no other reason that I’ve spent five months reading and watching everything I could find about the game. Heck while writing this essay I discovered the site had FINALLY received its own Wikipedia page, and I even stumbled across an interview with the designer Miro Haverinen. There’s more failure and exploration and analysis to come as I return to the dark dungeons of Fear & Hunger ready to fail again and again.
My nightmare is over, and now I get to play in the dark.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
10.28.2023
Like what you’re reading? Buy me a coffee & support my Patreon. Please and thank you.