Ravenous Devils, a review of management software where people are chopped and served

Percival and Hildred, two successful young entrepreneurs from the restaurant and fashion industry, have to change places frequently, as they fill social networks with motivational messages and complain about not finding employees willing to work for them for free. the originality of the ingredients used to make their dishes.

Unfortunately, the bigoted and backward society in which they live does not understand the beauty of grinding, bagging people, then serving their unwitting peers who are always hungry and not interested in asking questions, immersed in a hypocritical and limiting political correctness. about the origin of their food. Therefore, our aim is to Ravenous Devils review in an act of protest against the censorship of the art of this couple who made themselves.

Meat and clothing

With Italian software house Ravenous Devils Evil Villains GamesTo which we owe Hippocampus: Dark Fantasy Adventure and, more specifically, the Sexual Void, artistic direction designer Mirco Pierfederici and backed by Troglobytes Games decided to create an absolutely unsettling experience. We’re talking about something on paper to manage We are faced with a strangely emotional story in which we need to make Percival’s tailoring and Hildred’s restaurant efficient, but in reality two lovers support each other for better or worse. Especially bad.

In fact, the entire game takes place in a single building divided into four floors and framed to the sides: on one floor is the tailor shop where Percival works, on the other is the kitchen where Hildred works, and on the third is the shop in the middle. the other two are the restaurant where Hildred or a waitress serves food to customers (who obviously don’t know what it’s made of). The fourth and top floor is an attic with a greenhouse useful for growing some supplies for the restaurant (guess what they’re going to compost?), and a room for luxurious corpses (let’s call it that).

The turnover of the dynamic duo is simple to explain: Percival sells clothes for Hildred and kills people with scissors, sending her fresh corpses through a hatch that connects the tailor’s inner room to the kitchen.

Here the woman can capture the corpses and use them to make ground meat, sausages or steaks, the main ingredients of the meal. restaurant menu. Hildred must then pick up the ingredients and combine them with others at their desks and then put the food in the oven to cook before serving it in shop windows or on bar tables. Not all of the ingredients are available at the beginning, but they must be unlocked by purchasing upgrades for the kitchen in order to create more complex dishes.

plus one plate Obviously, the longer it takes to cook, the more customers will pay to eat it. But the restaurant isn’t the only one benefiting from the deaths of some customers, because the victims’ clothes are an excellent raw material for tailoring. Percival can actually use them to sew entirely new garments and then display them on the store’s mannequins for use by customers.

Date

In reality the restaurant and tailor shop are very poor at the beginning of the game, but by spending the money accumulated during the working days it is possible to improve all the buildings, buy the new materials mentioned above, add displays and tables to the bar. Increasing mannequins to showcase Percival’s clothing and improving work tools to speed up production. For example, you can buy more dining tables or a more efficient sewing machine that makes clothes faster. Besides equipping the rooms, it’s also possible to buy new outfits for Hildred and Percival to give the scenario an extra touch.

Given the game’s theme, it was inevitable that the player would be told one as well. Date. In reality the narrative aspect of Ravenous Devils is very discreet when it comes to how it intersects with the game, as well as cutscenes and letters.

There Date focuses on the fact that despite the work and talents of the two, someone has learned their real work and wants to use it in a pretty perverted way. In addition to the main story, there are secondary stories that are useful to bring out the more human and inhuman aspects of the couple. These are moments that are in no way invasive, distracting from the management part, as they occur between workdays and are not linked to specific mechanics. Once the story is over, in about five hours of gameplay (not a lot considering the very low price), you can continue running the business.

gameplay

in terms of gameplayThe Ravenous Devils are paradoxically comforting. The gameplay doesn’t include ending the game, and although there are sometimes exciting moments due to the overlapping of various missions, almost all of which are directly managed by the player, at most you can disappoint some customers by not serving them. at the end of the day you get less fame points for the place. So progress is steady and there is no risk of missing something or failing along the way, even if some errors are encountered. However, the game soon turns into a well-oiled mechanic, where the player sprints from one character to the top to give orders and spin the economy during animations.

It takes very little time to understand how to manage supplies and make sure not to be without it, plus using fully unconventional systems to optimize everything, like using a kitten for example, is ready to hunt in the face of some hugs. Mice to serve customers: a good fast food that costs practically zero and is also quick to prepare, and also a nice free-range meal.

Sure, after a few hours the system starts to tire, especially when there are no more improvements to buy and the formula starts to repeat itself, but right at that point the end comes to shut everything down and quench our thirst for blood. two heroes and us actors.

from perspective technician The Bad Vices Games title is crafted with great skill. Of course, it is very simple considering that it represents a single setting and some narrative sequences are entrusted to comics. In any case, the artistic direction is excellent and the animations, especially those related to killing and processing the raw material, do their job. Several visible environments are well modeled and offer delicious detail that enriches the scene. Maybe the background music is a little too monotonous, but it’s also suitable for the game genre, so it’s not very noticeable in the end.

Too much sense of death

Initially don’t kill people Serving them to other people conveys a certain uneasiness, also given the details of the animations (cutting for steak is particularly irritating), but you soon get used to it and it becomes a relaxing practice, pervading almost everywhere in its brutal beauty. When you let yourself go into their ganglion, Ravenous Devils mirrors a modernity in which you can gently sink, turning carnage into an economic, aseptically mechanical practice, where the increase in profits corresponds to the increase in our brutality. . While playing, we felt at peace with ourselves and understood the enormity of a system that sends some to the dough for the serenity and saturation of others. We imagined the ladies walking into our shop to buy meat pie, wiping their mouths politely after eating, burping silently after digesting them without knowing that they swallowed their neighbors who greeted all the women politely. In the morning and they knew nothing about them.

We dreamed of entering a store caravan of influencers Budding buds to photograph the fruit of all this effort and make it viral, we remembered and regretted that it was not the social network of the era represented in the game. But we felt like real entrepreneurs sacrificing everything for the good of their company, even their private lives, and we started to think about the truth by asking ourselves where we were on the food chain and whether it was at the end. We are in favor of minced meat, minced meat. In the meantime, it was a nice explanatory response that we kept turning the handle of the meat grinder without paying too much attention.