Fear & Hunger: Getting Sidetracked (killed) by Rabbits (*NSFW*)
Given the inordinate number of ways to perish in the videogame Fear & Hunger, and also given the varying degrees of severity of those deaths, I can say with certainty that I’d rather let the rabbits take me. I’d love to be able to get past the second level of the castle and actually learn more about the lore of this universe, but alas that requires skill, intellect, patience, and possibly an overwhelming masochistic personality…and granted I possess all of those, but I still can’t make it through the dungeons of Fear & Hunger before the Ogre’s get me.
To say nothing of their colossal penises.
Stingers. I meant stingers.
Not penises.
Though penises will be discussed here in a minute.
On that note, I should specify that this essay will be a tad NSFW, which is an internet term developed by the Renaissance Italian poet Francesco di Petracco, a.k.a. Petrarch which means “Not Safe For Work.”
Petrarch’s contributions to internet linguistics tend to get overshadowed by his contributions to poetry and his development of the sonnet. Such are the tragedies of life.
Fear & Hunger is a 2D scrolling, dark-medieval-fantasy, role playing videogame with turn-based combat released for Windows and Macintosh personal computers 21 January 2019. I’ve written, as of this writing, three essays about it already exploring my interactions with enemy non-playable characters (npcs), and most of my commentary is about how I’ve struggled to survive, and/or all the horrible ways the game has killed my characters. I have, to date, never tried to play a run of Fear & Hunger with the conviction to survive. Part of the reason is because I discovered the game after watching the YouTube video “The Cruelest Videogame” by Super Eyepatch Wolf. That video was largely the reason I decided to play this game in the first place, and it also did a wonderful job of preparing me for the inevitability of death in the gameplay. Much like Elden Ring and Cuphead, Fear & Hunger is built around punishing the player for making mistakes, or just existing. Every enemy encounter is something to be endured and survived rather than overcome for the purpose of becoming stronger. Pushing deeper and deeper into the dungeon will tax the player character (and/or their companions) with a combination of combat encounters, and two diminishing bars dedicated to hunger and sanity. If the player does nothing to counter these gauges from emptying the character could die from hunger (or worse) or they could be driven insane(or worse) which will result in another loss…(or worse).
This information is important because it informs how I’ve approached playing this game. Unlike some players who have driven themselves to insanity to see how far they can reach within the plot of the game, I’ve reminded myself that I enjoy playing videogames, however that does not make me good at them.
This is to say I suck, so the act of playing Fear & Hunger becomes a series of experiments in seeing how long I can survive before something kills me.
Naturally when I saw a naked man wearing a rabbit mask standing by a wooden gate my first response was to quote Alexander the Great who said, “Oh gum-drops, what the fresh fraggle fart is this?”
I believe Alexander the Great said that when his troops first encountered an elephant during his initial and failed invasion of India, but I could be wrong.
There are several open courtyards in the dungeons of Fear & Hunger, and apart from the usual decorations of hanging corpses, or that one cabin that I’ve never reached but totally know what waits within, they typically are one of the least horrific zones of the game…that is until you start thinking about what’s actually happening, but I’ll discuss that later in this essay. Naturally this can put the player on edge because anyone who’s watched the film Midsommar knows that darkness is not necessary to inspire horror. And naturally when I walked around a tower and discovered the wooden entrance guarded by this naked-but-for-the-bunny-mask human being I expected some combination between Eyes Wide Shut and Berserk.
And in a way I did get both.
Entering this part of the courtyard the player will approach what can only be described as an orgy…because it is one. A gathering of humans has set up shop in a corner of the castle and begun a celebratory ritual in honor of Sylvian the deity of love and fertility. I note as a brief aside that there are in fact numerous gods in Fear and Hunger, both Old and New, and depending on player choices they may or may not inevitably encounter one of these grand beings before being one-punched and forced to start their run over. Sylvian, as another brief aside, can be encountered as the final boss of the game, as long as the player is playing on the Terror & Starvation setting. I have never played in this setting because I can barely walk through the hallways without stepping on a nail and bleeding to death, and as such will likely never encounter her. Despite this I have encountered her followers and they demonstrated a unique manner of worship.
These cultists worship Sylvian by donning rabbit masks and having sex.
Regarding my verbiage, these are cultists because, I’m sorry, getting naked, having group sex, and wearing a rabbit mask while worshiping an ancient deity can’t be considered anything other than a cult (or maybe trying to actually purchase ink for a personal printer).
The cultists won’t attack the player as they enter the garden, nor will they even acknowledge their presence. This would be unnerving enough, given the context of everything the player has experienced up to this point, but the lack of…sounds, for lack of a better word, leaves the player in a sort of uncanny valley. The only noise is the occasional rasp of a crow, a stick cracking, and the audio files that trigger when players step out of the castle and this is a minimal noise at best. To compound the sensation of standing in a void, these non-playable characters won’t even acknowledge the player if they try to interact with them. As such the sensation of stepping into the orgy is no different than standing in the courtyard lined with hanging corpses.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll discuss the emotional and psychological impact this has later in the essay.
In terms of possible interaction the game affords the player a single NPC who stands in the middle of the orgy, simply waiting. Again, this is an orgy and there are characters encompassing the player who are coupled up and engaging in various sexual escapades so this lone figure standing by themselves, almost waiting for someone to appear furthers the uncanny perception of this scene. Unlike their companions however the player can speak with this figure, who asks if the player would like to join them.
Now, it’s important to note that almost every interaction in Fear & Hunger will trigger either a coin toss, or an immediate (and almost always) negative reaction to the player. Even looking at bookshelves or sleeping in a bed to save the game requires players to guess a coin toss, and failure almost always results in triggering a fight with a monster (that will usually kill me), or a cut-scene in which the player is murdered brutally (which will definitely kill me). My reader can understand why, at this moment, I was hesitant to reply yes if only because I wasn’t sure how a group of horned-up, rabbit-mask-wearing cultists would murder me.
Like any good scientist though, I said, “Sure, screw it, why not?” And thus I selected yes and joined the orgy.
What’s most important is that at this moment no coin toss was prompted.
Instead the screen faded to black briefly before opening back up and I observed my character on their hands and knees, naked, wearing a rabbit mask, and being penetrated from behind. The screen went black again, and when light returned my character was clothed and standing in the middle of the cult, a small text-box informing me that my health and spirits were refreshed. There was also a note that I almost lost myself to the revelry but I came to my senses to resume my journey.
This could have been the end of the experience but, again, I approached Fear & Hunger scientifically, meaning I’m curious about every aspect of its systems and I wanted to see if it was possible to resume participating in the orgy…for science.
Just science.
And nothing else.
Sure enough talking to the npc who had just finished making me feel like a confident and beautiful woman (which was strange given the fact I was playing as the male barbarian) offered me the chance to go ahead. Marvelling at this fellow’s refractory period (and totally not feeling a tinge of jealousy) I decided I would do it.
Before we started round two the game provided a brief message noting that I may not be strong enough this time to pull from the lure of Syvlian’s embrace.
Still I selected yes.
At this point a coin-toss was prompted.
And I won.
Once again the cut scene of my player being totally rammed in a respectable way played and I woke up refreshed and ready to resume my investigations.
I talked to the NPC again…for science, and once again I won the coin toss.
I talked to the NPC two more times before I lost the coin-toss.
The result of the loss was (apart I’m sure from some pretty bad chafing) that the game played the cutscene again of my character having sex until the screen went black and a message appeared informing me that I eventually lost my sense of self and ego and was lost to the insanity of the cult of Sylvian.
The title card appeared and faded, I was taken back to the main menu, and the title theme began to play. I had died.
But man…what a way to go.
I started this essay with a joke about how losing my sanity to this rabbit-mask wearing cult isn't the worst way to die in Fear & Hunger, and to be fair that wasn’t entirely an empty throw-away gag. Fear & Hunger is a cruel videogame, not simply because of the mechanics that often leave my characters broken, bloody, missing limbs, losing their minds, or starving to death and forcing me to consider the corpses scattered around the dungeon less as decorative set-pieces and more as a way of filling up my health inventory...and my stomach. Fear & Hunger is a game overflowing with brutality in terms of physical, psychological, and sexual harm. Characters will lose limbs, stumble into traps that hobble them, become infected with parasites, be captured and tortured by sadistic monsters and warped human beings, and sometimes even sexually assaulted. On a recent playthrough I played as the Knight, and when I lost a coin-toss to an Ogre I was greeted with a cut-scene of my character being sexually assaulted before I was given back control and forced to crawl until bleeding out. And it’s just as important to note that sexual violence can be visited upon any character in the game regardless of gender.
Oh, and the Harvestmen…
You know what, don’t fight the Harvestmen.
Just run.
The slim margin for error, and the brutality of punishment during that inevitable failure make a game that is not easily accessible to a mass audience of videogame players. To play Fear & Hunger, one has to develop either a thick skin to endure the dark aesthetic, or, the alternative, is to develop what might be considered a slightly warped sense of humor. To wit: I’m able to laugh at a cult of religious fanatics who have gone insane and do nothing but have sex until they die. I laugh at this because I recognise simultaneously that what I’m encountering is just as horrific as everything else in the game.
The Cult of Sylvian at first glance seems like a reprieve from the darkness and pain that will be encountered by players throughout the rest of the game, and it seems that way because sex is involved.
But it’s not.
The sex players are witnessing and participating in is not something intimate between two people, nor is it the culmination of desire, it’s actually just madness and usurpation of their ego. The masks are on one level a play on an anonymity kink, but narratively it’s a way of controlling the person under the mask. By stripping themselves of their personality they eliminate their identity and fall deeper into the mania that is the quasi-religious display. The cultists have completely lost themselves to a god that doesn’t actually care about them as individual people, and given the theology of Fear & Hunger it’s almost certain that the god Sylvian doesn’t care about them at all. And while the sex initially appears tempting it’s important to remember these cultists will fornicate to the point of death meaning at some point they won’t eat, they won’t sleep, and their bodies will waste away.
And dying slowly from starvation and exhaustion is, fun fact, not sexy.
It’s horrific.
And it’s a reminder that no end in Fear & Hunger is a happy one, even if orgasms are involved.
Sexuality in videogames has typically been reward-centered in terms of design, the strip-club minigames in Grand Theft Auto 5 being a good example. In that game players can go to a strip club, pay for a lap dance, and play a minigame where they must try to seduce a stripper while avoiding being seen by a bouncer. Winning that game results in the player taking that stripper home and having sex with them, and then receiving nude text messages from afore-mentioned stripper. Likewise in most videogames on the market sexuality is employed less as a choice mechanic, and more as a reward system. This can lead one to the near ocean of pornographic videogames available easily on platforms such as Steam, and most of these games treat sex as a reward for a short minigame or a trinket to be collected along the main storyline. The player performs some task or action and is thus rewarded with still images or short cutscenes showing their character having sex that can be revisited at a later time. The point is, sexuality is commodified in the videogame market, and designers have, to date, largely left the choice of sex as a reward system for players rather than employing it for a deeper narrative structure or as part of the design of the game.
Fear & Hunger is the only game I’ve experienced where the choice to have sex can impact the pay-run in a significant fashion.
Put another way, I can’t think of any game I’ve played where the choice to have sex can literally end the game.
There’s a lot of sex and sexual imagery in Fear & Hunger, and most of it is corrupt or purely atmospheric. Nearly every enemy one encounters has a penis which is visible, there’s phallic artwork scattered throughout the dungeons, and, as I’ve observed, much of the horror in the game blends violence and sexuality to establish the horror aesthetic. It’s impossible to avoid sex in Fear & Hunger, and I’m fascinated how the choice (or more often the lack of choice) for sexual behavior is designed into the game mechanics itself. Fear & Hunger centers the game around choices, and how each choice can result either in more choices to make or else a dramatic and violent usurpation of my agency. The psychological effect of the game becomes an endless fight to maintain whatever slim manner of control of myself I have, while recognising how little control I actually possess. No matter how far I progress, no matter how careful I approach every new obstacle, no matter how much I learn about the lore and rules of this universe, everything can be taken away from me with just one coin toss.
It makes absolute sense to me that the designer Miro Haverinen would at some point offer the player the chance to have sex. It’s another choice to make, and just like every choice made before it I can see the risk, I can observe the possibility for failure, I can observe the horrific consequences that could come from this choice.
But, I’ve fought (and outrun) a fair number of Ogres, I’ve fought the Harvestmen, I’ve fled the cold dead eyes of the Crow Mauler, and I’ve been one-punched by the Iron Shakespeare. Out of everything in this miserable castle, The Cult of Sylvian isn’t a great choice, but it’s my choice to make. If death comes at the cost of a bunny mask and an orgy then I stand where I did at the start of the essay.
There’s definitely worse ways to go.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
7.27.2026
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