Fear & Hunger 2: Termina could be one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.

I admit, I’m still probably in my honeymoon phase with the game (I’ve put in about twenty hours). But there’s an infectious quality to it; the richness of its world decimates any typos (like the amusing duck tape item I scavenge from shelves) that one finds. The game’s unfolding narrative and its potential depth are just as encompassing and as thrilling as any story that one can experience. There have been so many moments where I’ve thought “wow, this blows the doors off of what I was expecting”. So many moments where I’ve thought “this will demand a replay”. So many mechanics that I have just barely begun to comprehend and understand. And I’ve barely scraped the surface.

The game’s enormous world, centered smartly around a single, depraved town known as Prehevil, is both intimidatingly large but also intimately focused in scope. Being a single town, it gives it a clarity in its design and theming that makes it feel like the whole town is building towards something. I tend to prefer games that give the player its ultimate goal in the opening minutes, as it establishes stakes, and also gives the player something to focus on. If the ultimate goal is to reach a tower, then the player will soon find sets of micro-problems within the larger goal. Every extra complication is something you have to think carefully about. But the game often doesn’t give you much time to comprehend these extra complications.

I think what I am coming to appreciate most is the realness of the game’s violence, and how fraught every encounter feels. In games, a one-on-one struggle to the death is not often given an appropriate level of weight for what it actually is. And I’m not saying every game should be a downer, that makes you reflect on the seriousness of life and death – but hey, it doesn’t hurt. The game’s violence is brutal, short, and melancholic. The JRPG style combat which I normally get frustrated with in games (because it often takes so long) is a “joy” here because of how quick it is. Most combats seem to end in just one or two rounds with regular enemies, and bosses really are only five or six rounds long (at least so far). This shortness, this sharpness, is exactly what I like to see. Every move you make has to be carefully considered, because if it’s not, you’re likely to end up dead, maimed, or infected very quickly. Thus, strategy is integral. And humbling is frequent. I have lost count of the number of enemies who I have fought for the first time, only to be killed because they show some new trait or act differently than how I expected them to. This is not a bad thing – this is a learning process.

It is humbling when even the first enemy you encounter can bite you just once, and leave you struggling with an infected limb. If you neglected to find any items that can deal with infection, death is sure to follow. I think Termina is a game that showcases my predilection for video game enforced masochism. At first, I was really getting frustrated with just how luck-based everything seemed to be. Loot was random (for the most part), enemies could sometimes get lucky and hack a limb off, or get a bite in that lost me vital healing supplies, and end a run. But slowly, as I pushed further and further into the horrible depths of Prehevil, I began to see the point of it all. I’ll get to it in a minute.

Termina reminds me a lot of Pathologic in how it forces you to keep going despite bad luck or player failure, actually. The structure is certainly similar. You have a limited amount of time. You pick from a list of playable characters, each with their own backstories, goals, personalities, and agendas, and the other characters stay in play, opposing (or working with) you. The game’s brutal difficulty serves as a reminder that you are not in control, that you are not the hero of the story. It reminds the player that success has to be earned.

I think I’ve discussed this a bit, but maybe I’m coming to terms finally with the impact that violence has in games. Violence can be something cheap, something throwaway. It can be a moment to shock and excite, something to get the audience’s heart pumping – but it can also be totally meaningless beyond that. Violence does not have to be the only way we can get audiences interested. And even if it is – violence can still be interesting.

In Termina, I have watched a man’s head get sawn off about ten times. Each time, the sound effects of the man’s tendons being severed sends a chill down my spine. The moment is treated with this shocking silence, but it’s also a moment you can just… stumble across. There’s no dramatic music sting. No slow pan to the thing that’s doing this. It’s the terrible bluntness, the matter-of-factness about it, that gives the violence weight and meaning. The violence itself feels almost meaningless, cruelty for cruelty’s sake. But in its frank honesty about how nasty it is, the game elevates itself. No longer is it just a horror game about killing monsters. It’s a horror game about looking at the people suffering beneath forces they don’t understand, or did not question until it was too late.

Police officers wander the streets still, horribly mutated, but still trying to enact order (albeit in a deluded way). Awe-inspiring Inquisitors, helmets shaped into flesh (or vice versa), tower over you, still clinging desperately to their religion as a justification for their maleficence. In almost every enemy, you can see the person that they used to be – whether they were good or not is almost irrelevant. Everybody – every body – in this game is subject to violence.

I saw a soldier –  masked and looming – gunning down villagers. The same villagers who had tried to butcher me just a few hours ago, were now fodder for the idle cruelty of the soldier. That playthrough ended not long after, his gun spelling my doom, too. But the cycle continues. Horror is built of these cycles, these ancient bones, running again and again. Talking to enemies can be strangely satisfying. It is there that we see the human in those we cannot save, feel the guilt, perhaps, for those now irredeemable, those now monstrous.

The game’s framing takes it a step further than Pathologic. Beyond just direct competition, you are expected to wipe out the other characters. This is where the game first blew my mind properly. The option to Attack comes with most dialogue choice lists, and I tried it a few times on earlier playthroughs. God, the guilt – it’s so strange how it manifests itself. Attacking other human beings, breaking their arms with wrenches or stabbing them with kitchen knives – even in the sprite-work of the RPG Maker engine, these moments of violence are deliberate. They aren’t forced upon you (aside from one or two encounters I’ve found so far that prompt self-defense more readily than your own unprovoked attacks) – you force them on others.

The game’s violence is certainly less sexually charged than in what I experienced of Fear & Hunger, (which I will go back to – I’ve just found myself unexpectedly enraptured with the sequel). This is not a bad thing, just an alternative change. An emphasis seems to be placed more firmly on the horrors of war, and the depredations of those that would exploit belief and ancient power. The stale stench of madness, brought on by things beyond human comprehension – or so it seems, so far. But the smallest, “best” horrors are the ones we see committed by the human beings in the setting. It is the contrast that makes it most effective – the human killers are made more disturbing by their proximity to legitimate monsters.

The music is simply sublime. An array of harsh, uncanny, or disturbing sounds help to reinforce the miserable atmosphere. The occasional tracks that do sound pleasant make it clear that you have reached a spot that, for now at least, is untouched by evil. I look forward to incorporating most of the tracks into my future tabletop roleplaying sessions, because the atmosphere just oozes from every sound. When playing the game, it is hard to know if a sound symbolizes that an enemy is moving around, or if it is just ambience. This adds tension, particularly as the sound design is just that good that you can never know for sure. Your footsteps change on every single patch of alternate terrain. In the tunnels beneath the earth, stepping onto metal feels like a death sentence, as your footsteps surely ring through the concrete corridors. Even if they don’t, the game inspires these thoughts in me. Mechanical depth might not exist in that particular instance, but the game is immersive enough for me to believe it does – which, in the moment, might be all that counts.

The game is more than mechanically deep enough elsewhere, though. Countless items, countless weapon types, many rituals to experiment with, many mechanics hidden behind skills in a labyrinthian skill tree… far too much to document or know in the short twenty hours I have played the game.

The point of the game’s randomness, its crushing difficulty, to me seems to be that everything can be learned and adapted to. Every new encounter you make it to is a milestone. Every time your limb is blown off, every time you are decapitated, flayed to death, brutalized in increasingly horrible ways – a new idea forms in your head. A new strategy. Rise again. The game’s luck is a key component of the skill required to beat it. There are strategies I could share here, but there’s no point. Because this game deserves to be played by those who can stomach its content. And playing is a process of discovery. Play is intimate – play exposes oneself, to oneself. A confessional booth in the game is a moment of roleplaying perfection so perfect that inhabiting the character is seamless. I reflected on everything my character had done to reach that booth, and then realized that it had been me that had done those things. The realization came as I was already answering the questions naturally. It was a brutal, sharp reminder of the things that games can reveal to us. About the things horror can show us in safe spaces. If only it was that the world could discover the darkness within the safe spaces of horror. Alas…

I have found myself dreaming of this game. It helps I’ve been playing it relentlessly (or so it feels) for about a week. In the stitched-together madness, it feels like I am reminded of every good game I have ever played. Termina is intelligent. It respects my time and my effort by rewarding learning. To overcome an obstacle is to prove to the game – to yourself – that you understand. The moral choices are scintillating. The snippets of character development and worldbuilding are engrossing. I have wondered for so long if there was ever a game I would love as much as I do Pathologic – if there was ever a game that could recreate the special experience of disempowerment, disgust, and dismay of The Void. I think, in Termina in particular, I have found it. Can there be higher praise than that? A game to rival the best I have ever played – a game to give me that same, addictive, dark feeling as Forbidden Siren and Silent Hill. There’s more to say, but I think I’ll save that for after I’ve finished at least one run – or played another twenty hours. It has inspired me to look into RPGMaker to see what can be done with it. Maybe it’s the framework I need for now, given I hardly have the time to use Godot, and I have found my game idea has rapidly outgrown Twine.

Termina is a game about moral decay, about the broken people we all hide. About ancient rituals and fevered dreams. About a moon with a “rapist’s smile”. About the plans of megalomaniacs, twisted gods, and endless, spiteful cruelties. One location I visited hit me so hard I almost cried. Another left me feeling sickening fear, such as I haven’t felt in a while (well, aside from when I read the news).

But in the midst of all of these feelings can come… triumph.

The enemy who once dismembered me lies dead at my feet, glass shards in his eyes, my knife buried in his gut. The pain goes on – the cycle continues.

But, in my hubris, I endure.