Hungry Horrors
Most roguelite deckbuilders cast combat as the central tension. Hungry Horrors, made by Clumsy Bear Studio, replaces combat entirely with cookery: the goal of every encounter is to satisfy a mythological creature’s hunger before it satisfies its own appetite with the protagonist. The result is a card game built around feeding rather than fighting, with a flavour system — salty, sour, savoury, bitter, and sweet — doing the work that damage types do elsewhere.
The setup is deliberately anti-fairytale. A spoilt princess wakes in a cursed dungeon with no rescuer incoming, only a talking cat, a recipe book, and the news that the creatures of British and Irish folklore have all turned ravenous. She cooks her way home, one Horror at a time, and she is not happy about it. The tone is dry and character-driven, rooted in English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish legend: opponents include Jenny Greenteeth, the Dullahan, Y Fad Felen, and others drawn faithfully from their source traditions.
Each run builds a deck of authentic regional recipes — Cranachan, Jellied Eels, Yorkshire Pudding, Toad in the Hole — gathered as ingredients appear on the road. Every dish carries a flavour tag, and every Horror has cravings it rewards and flavours it punishes. Chaining the right tastes in sequence amplifies satisfaction; misreading an appetite ends the run. Cookware items bend encounter rules, card seasoning shifts a dish’s flavour and unlocks new abilities, and familiars trail the princess to sniff out potions. Fishing pulls in additional ingredients and loot. The world spans dark woods, bogs, and meadows, populated by folkloric characters carrying quests and merchants selling artefacts.
The main campaign carries persistent progression between runs: unlocked recipes, abilities, and seasonings accumulate across attempts. A Vanilla mode offers the baseline experience; Spicy mode tightens the pressure, and stackable modifiers including Culinary and Gourmet alter each run further.
Hungry Horrors launched into Early Access on January 19, 2026, and has been updated steadily since. A Seashore biome arrived in April 2026, followed through May by Spicy Mode, speed options, cookware artwork, performance improvements, and repeated balance passes. June 2026 brought Banquet Mode, a new variant beta-tested on a separate branch before full release. The Loch biome entered beta in June and rolled out as a full update in July 2026. The game received Steam Deck verification in February 2026 and was built by a two-person team.
Players who found Cobalt Core’s flavour-chaining combat systems compelling will find Hungry Horrors occupying adjacent creative space, swapping sci-fi abstraction for myth and replacing tactical damage for appetite management.
