HANGRY Preview

Are you a big eater? Do you like hunting down your food while paying off a considerable debt? Well, then Game Pill’s latest project, HANGRY, might be the title for you. I had the chance to try out the recently released demo on Steam to see if this was a game worth sinking your teeth into or if you would be better served getting a salad. 

The demo doesn’t give the full experience of the game, but it does give a brief rundown of the plot: you play as Hangry, a big fuzzy blue mercenary with a pompadour, anger issues and a hunger that won’t stop. You have been tasked by Goutra, the chief chef of an underworld diner, to gather ingredients to pay off your debt. While we don’t get much in the way of character in the demo, we see enough to know that everything isn’t as it seems, and we are in a dangerous line of work. Thankfully, we have the skills to defend our fuzzy blue butts. 

Our main means of defending ourselves (and finding things to eat) is combat. It feels pretty good with a mix of light and heavy attacks that you can string into combos and execution moves that offer buffs when pulled off. It’s all simple to understand, and HANGRY certainly isn’t reinventing the wheel. Although, if I am honest, it doesn’t really need to at this point, although I could see it getting pretty dull over time. Including weapons and special abilities will help mitigate this, so it’ll be interesting to see how many options we have over time. Finally, HANGRY has an evolution mechanic that lets you upgrade nearly everything about yourself, including your liver.

This combat will help you in your main goal, hunting and gathering ingredients. You do this by collecting resources and killing enemies. While fighting is a big part of this, you’ll need to hunt down your opponent by smell and tracking them (however, all this does is add a coloured filter to the screen). You’ll unlock recipes as you go which, judging by the trailer, your employer can cook in the restaurant. It does feel like HANGRY could get a bit tedious with all the gathering, especially if it is a long game, but this could be mitigated if the other planets on offer are as interesting to look at as the demos.

Though HANGRY is a great title visually, it is also one of the choppiest games I've played in a while. I had to tweak the settings a fair amount to get it to work, and a bit of research showed I wasn’t the only one with this issue. Saying that, once I got it running, I was blown away by the imagination on display for the creatures and planet. I saw Taco dogs, for crying out loud, TACO DOGS. It put me in mind of Delicious in Dungeon, honestly, but in space. The main character was equally entertaining, simply because of how over-the-top hard-edge he was trying to be. 

HANGRY is an interesting premise, and it certainly has the room to grow to be an indie darling thanks to the humour and character designs if nothing else. However, it needs to make sure it retains enough variety to cover the tedium that resource gathering can bring.