Don’t Let It Starve needs you to make some tasty lunches by squeezing as much food into a bento as you can. Or else.
You find yourself in a rather gloomy kitchen with a polite guest that asks you to put your cooking skills to the test. They seem quite charming, but they also make it very clear that if you don’t satisfy their hunger with food, they will have to add you to the menu. Something about those giant hands reaching out from a long, dark corridor was extremely motivating for my newfound cooking activities.
To make sure that you don’t get eaten, you need to create bento boxes stuffed with enough food points that our guest is too full to eat you as well. The bentos are split up into grids (nine, sixteen, and twenty-five) that can be filled with the oddly-shaped foods you’re handed with each placement. As this is a roguelike, you’re randomly given three foods you need to find a home for in your current grid. Choose too many weirdly-shaped foods and you’ll quickly find you have no way forward and have to give the bento to your guest as-is. Given that you get huge bonuses for creating even lines and filling every block in the box, you really need to think about how you want to lay out your food.
As the score requirements can be pretty tight throughout Don’t Let It Starve, there are thankfully items that can help you out. These all cost some money, though, and money is not easy to come by as you can only get a coin or two by using smaller bentos as you try to feed the guest. That comes with greater risk of failing, though, creating this tense juggling act as you try to make funds for bonuses while feeding the guest enough to stay alive. I didn’t know packing a lunch could be so intense, and I’m very curious to see how the full game plays out.
Don’t Let It Starve is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can grab a demo from itch.io and add it to your Steam Wishlist.
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