Hungry Horrors – Feeding Monsters Is the Easy Part

I spend plenty of time with roguelikes, rougelites and deckbuilders, including Slay the Spire 2, Balatro, or Hades II, but Hungry Horrors gives familiar deck construction an appealing culinary purpose: every dish is a card, and every monster is another demanding mouth to feed. Clumsy Bear Studio’s full release expands that idea into one massive adventure, although its inventive combinations come with a progression grind that increasingly tested my patience.

My 15 hours include roughly five at the beginning of Early Access and another ten with version 1.0. I reached the final biome without completing the campaign, so I cannot judge its ending. What I can say is that building a powerful menu kept drawing me back, even when earning enough upgrades to advance started feeling like work.

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Cooking up a combination

You play a spoilt princess trying to save a kingdom afflicted by a ravenous curse, feeding creatures drawn from British and Irish folklore before they make a meal of you. The completed release offers eight biomes, 34 Horrors and 62 dishes based on traditional recipes. Version 1.0 opens the Megaliths and makes the campaign completable, adding its final stretch alongside further creatures, ingredients and equipment.

Feeding replaces basic attacks, but these encounters still demand careful planning. Dishes have flavours such as sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savoury, and their cravings encourage you to serve them in a particular order. A sweet dish might create a craving for something sour, which you satisfy with your next card before following its craving into another flavour. Extending that sequence builds the kind of satisfying combinations that make a well-constructed deck feel like more than a collection of useful cards.

Each Horror complicates that sequence through foods it loves, likes, dislikes or hates. Matching a favourite can strengthen your results, while an unsuitable dish can disrupt the chain you were trying to maintain. Building around those preferences becomes increasingly important, because a deck that handles an early encounter comfortably may struggle against a later creature with a different appetite.

Ingredients and seasonings give you considerable freedom to respond. Seasonings improve dishes with bonuses such as additional feeding power or other effects, allowing even humble starting cards to remain useful when supported properly. I particularly enjoyed how many parts of a build could work together, rather than feeling obliged to replace every early recipe as soon as something new appeared. The pleasure comes from finding a role for a dish and improving the combinations around it.

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A kingdom worth another visit

Each biome has its own enemies and bosses, giving those deckbuilding decisions different tests as you progress. The range of creatures was one of my favourite parts of Hungry Horrors, especially when a new opponent’s preferences made me reconsider the menu I had been relying on.

Within a biome, choosing what to pursue also gives each attempt a useful direction. Gold, potions and cookware offer different ways to prepare for the encounters ahead. Equipment and artefacts provide bonuses that can influence feeding power or shop costs, while a potion collected earlier may help you through a difficult fight. There was usually something I wanted to obtain or improve, which made another attempt tempting.

You can revisit earlier biomes or move directly into tougher unlocked areas. I appreciated having that freedom, although jumping ahead rarely felt advisable without sufficient preparation. Returning to familiar territory lets you strengthen your position, but it also exposes the campaign’s biggest weakness.

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When preparation becomes a grind

The Book of Taliesin provides permanent upgrades through a skill tree, with scrolls funding improvements such as additional shield and greater scroll earnings. I understand the appeal of becoming stronger between attempts, but the amount of repetition involved made progress feel too dependent on time invested.

After 15 hours across both versions, I had reached the last biome and still felt that further upgrading was necessary before I could overcome it. That is my experience rather than proof that grinding is the only possible solution, but it left me frustrated with how long the campaign takes to reveal its full potential. Enjoying the deckbuilding did not stop repeated preparation from becoming tiring.

Discovering preferences adds another demand on that preparation. At campfires, I could spend scrolls to investigate what a monster liked, but the information available was tied to dishes in my current build. Learning through experimentation fits the premise, yet gathering that knowledge alongside permanent upgrades and seasonings stretched out the process of getting ready for later challenges.

The difficulty curve compounds the problem. Early encounters can ask for relatively little food, while later opponents may have hunger totals in the thousands. Some fights against enemies with around 4,000 hunger took me roughly ten to fifteen minutes. Large appetites can justify carefully developed combinations, but certain bosses and biomes felt disproportionately demanding compared with what preceded them.

Those spikes made the option to skip earlier areas less attractive, because I often felt pushed to work through familiar biomes to assemble a sufficiently strong build. I like preparing for a dangerous encounter; I am less enthusiastic when the preparation repeatedly consumes so much of the session.

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A story interrupted by another attempt

The folklore, mythology and reluctant princess give Hungry Horrors an appealing premise, but I struggled to stay invested in the plot. Replaying areas, restarting and testing builds created long gaps between meaningful story developments. By the time I defeated another boss, I sometimes barely remembered the narrative context.

That does not mean the story lacks a direction. Its momentum simply became buried beneath the repeated attempts, leaving the creatures and culinary systems more memorable than the events connecting them.

Banquet offers a different structure through shorter, harder, more randomized runs. It is a permadeath roguelike rather than the Campaign’s persistent progression model, so it should be considered separately from building up the Princess over repeated campaign attempts. Its inclusion gives players another way to explore the systems without following the same story structure.

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Worth your time?

Hungry Horrors earns my recommendation through the flexibility of its dishes and the pleasure of feeding demanding folklore creatures with a carefully assembled menu. At 14.79€, it offers plenty to experiment with for genre newcomers willing to learn and established deckbuilder fans alike, although neither group should underestimate its appetite for their time. 

I wanted a smoother difficulty curve and less repeated preparation, but those frustrations never completely displaced my interest in building another combination. Come prepared for a lengthy campaign, and there is an inventive, affordable deckbuilder here worth exploring.

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THE VERDICT

Final thoughts

Hungry Horrors kept me coming back because building a menu, improving humble dishes with seasonings and chaining flavours against folklore creatures gives its deckbuilding a distinct identity. That creativity makes the repeated preparation more frustrating, though, because I wanted to experiment with new combinations rather than revisit familiar areas to earn upgrades for another steep difficulty spike.