Dread Hunger is a PvP adventure that will put your friendships to the test

Whether I was plotting the deaths of my crewmates through occult magic or killing my ally out of fear of being betrayed, Dread Hunger never allowed me to feel at ease, but in a good way. As I worked with my teammates to navigate an explorer’s ship past icebergs and icy blizzards, the threat of betrayal from within was omnipresent, and the temptation to keep checking over my shoulder was at odds with compliance. of the tasks before me. As an evil Thrall working against the group, being outnumbered and the fear of being discovered forced me to be smart about when and where to act against the group. Dread Hunger constantly challenged me to be smarter no matter which side I was on, making me giggle, yell, and have fun at every match.

Dread Hunger is a social deception game in the first place, but it is also an adventure game with mechanics of survival and crafting, exploration and combat, and those components can conflict with social deception. Combat in particular can be problematic, because if you give a player a weapon, they will want to shoot someone. If left unchecked, things can quickly turn into a free-for-all PvP mode with none of the substance you’d want in a social cheating game, but the developers are working to make those kinds of easy answers less doable in your next game. upgrade. .

Screenshots of Dread Hunger

The best mechanic I discovered as one of the treacherous slaves is that each player respawns after being killed, allowing them to easily give me away if I cornered them alone and tried to kill them myself. Instead, I had to get creative with the poison, use dark rituals to make a group of cannibals take on someone traveling alone, sabotage the ship, or find other little ways to undermine the group, such as throwing valuable coal into the river so that I could not. be used by the crew.

On the contrary, as a good boy, it was tempting to simply kill someone whom he suspected was a traitor. But, as I learned when I killed an innocent man on suspicion, Dread Hunger does not reward this kind of behavior. By killing someone based on guesswork, I mistakenly killed an ally and greatly decreased my chances of survival, not to mention that people were much more suspicious of me! Instead, finding creative ways to expose the bad guys was my only hope of winning the day. The more I played, the more I understood the nuances of when the group was ready for betrayal or when it was appropriate to act on my suspicions of someone else, and I was rewarded for that discipline and restraint.

The toolbox on both sides for uncovering the truth was intricate and packed with different strategies you could take. As a regular crew member, I was able to show my loyalty by openly contributing to the group’s progress, such as fueling the ship’s engine with coal and healing injured crewmates. And, by keeping an eye on who was being less helpful and / or in close proximity to people who were unlucky, I was able to help deduce who the traitors were.

As a villain, I had a bunch of dark rituals at my disposal, each one intended to be used indirectly, to keep combat open only as a last resort, such as the ability to fill the level with thick fog, obscuring everyone’s vision and making make most tasks take much longer. And instead of directly killing anyone, I could just drag my feet and make everything take longer to increase our party’s chances of failure, like when I “accidentally” shot an ally during a fight with some wolves and wasted time and valuable resources to cure it.

The delicate balance between adventure play and social deception is a challenging balancing act, but so far Dread Hunger seems poised to tackle that task by forcing players to play smart or suffer the consequences of their ineptitude. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the next game.