Games Where Needing to Eat Actually Becomes Annoying - an IFDB Poll

by RetroProgressive
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On the big list of insta-kill features that will cause the less patient to completely refuse to consider playing a work, it appears that "needing to eat" is well up there. We are not talking about some game where the object is to eventually eat a perfect burrito or soup, which could potentially be fun. We are not talking about works that have significant amounts of strategy in them, where managing resources is the point of the game, as you travel thousands of miles over the course of months in the game. Also, some works have such low needs, in hundreds or thousands of moves, to just find and eat something at some point, just to add some color, crunch and flavor to the game, it would be really silly to be annoyed about it or complain about it.

To belong on this list, you should be busy trying to save the world, get rich, attain true love or something rather important. You are killing dragons, solving the most devious puzzles, coming to terms with your own back-story, whatever -- but dang, your game is over again due to starving to death. You'd apparently only been playing a couple of hours in game time, to...

I used to think people were just being impatient and intolerant and looking for things to get annoyed about. Surely there was nothing like in the classic CRPG Rogue that a huge percentage of otherwise-great runs ended in painful, slowly, inevitably starving to death, in the most un-fun way imaginable.

Or maybe there were, and I just never tripped across them despite feeling I'd played a lot...

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The Adventurers' Museum, by Lee Chapel
1 vote
(No comment) [+](No comment) --Canalboy...

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Enchanted Castle, by Michael Wilk
1 vote
"120 locations so far and not a bite to eat" [+]"120 locations so far and not a bite to eat: I kept thinking I was just missing something. As I explored more and more, finding 20, 40, 68, 80 and so far 120 locations, I was sure I'd find a stale crust of bread, a half-rotten piece of fruit, some acorns, something, anything. But either I missed something obvious, or it is ridiculously easy to starve to death in this game. Which I've done. A lot. There are four potential goals to this game, you learn before it starts. I'd add the fifth, worry about those after you figure out how not to starve to death every time, in what is represented as a few hours in the game. This work is textier than Infocom and many modern works, with implementations and parsing more like Scott Adams level (but feels harsher because the descriptions are so lushly descriptive)...it has single-handedly caused me to reconsider my long-held notion that refusing to play something because you ever needed to eat anything in it was narrow-minded or silly. It might be pretty annoying." --RetroProgressive...

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Poll created on November 24, 2023