In The Hungry One, you play the role of a young scientist experimenting on a virtual world. You control the AI living within the virtual world, and are tasked with keeping him alive. There’s three needs meters for hunger, energy, and sanity that have to be balanced for him to live.
If he gets too hungry, or if his energy meter runs out, he dies. However, he won’t die if the sanity meter runs out. That’s the most important stat of the game, and as it goes down, the environment changes. Blood spatter appears all over the walls. Some of it spells out numbers, or displays satanic symbols.
A girl also appears in your room, and she wants to leave this place. Who is she? It appears you know her, but she only appears when you have zero sanity. So she’s probably not really here. The door is the only exit and you’ve been trapped here since it has a coded lock. She gives you the code to leave the house 7-6-2-1. Though when you go to leave the house, something terrible happens outside of this world.
Since I was curious, I deleted the save data and went back to enter in the code ahead of time. It doesn’t work too well though, and a dog attacks you. Then the game calls you a cheater if you try to play it again.
The Hungry One is a combination of horror and drama about loneliness and its consequences. I really enjoyed the small virtual world and balancing the needs with everything in the house. I hope to see the full game which has a planned release in 2022. It would be nice to have more objects around the house that effect needs in different ways.
Key features planned
- A tricky mystical story
- Multiple/secret endings
- Random events
- Puzzles
- Unusual visual style
