“A cute, colourful, but flawed game”
Developed and published by Drecom Co., Ltd, Hungry Meem is a combines strategy, simulation, and colony management to guide “adorable” creatures called Meems who are in a constant state of hunger, and help them rebuild their settlement.
One day you come across a picture book about Meems. These strange little creatures are facing extinction, one of the smarter Meems created a miraculous cooking pot to keep everyone fed, but one day a Meem gets a little over excited and the miraculous pot is broken, and the Meems are starving.
You must now guide them through exploration, resource gathering, and village-building so that they can grow the world tree and create a thriving community. This involves directing Meems to scavenge materials like sticks, vines, and food.
To do this you use a simple point and click mechanic to position a storage bag that dictates their actions. Want that acorn? Drop the bag near it and a Meem will pick it up and put it in the bag. However, if the Meems get hungry, and they get hungry a lot, they have a tendency to freak out and will start to remove items from the bag, so it’s important to keep them fed by making them snacks.
Back at the village, you can cook meals, construct Meem Houses and Love Nests, and complete quests for an all-knowing statue named Tohren, this will unlock feasts that level up the World Tree, and in turn open up more of the world to explore.
It is the Meems themselves that are the reel hook, they are kind of adorable, in a dear God what is that kind of way. They can evolve through the activities that they do and learn new skills. You can breed Meems, adding a layer of customization as you create unique variations.
The story is engaging enough, presenting as a quest to rewrite a sad story into a happy one. Keeping the Meems fed and happy perpetuates the growth of The World Tree, fuelled by the “light of joy” from feasts. The Quest system involving Tohren adds a little structure to the story, but the gather, cook, build nature of the game gets rather repetitive. The ability to expand the village offers some variety, and the mechanic to breed Meems mixes things up a little, but progression is lacking in any meaningful way, and after a while you start to feel like you’re not really getting anywhere, and the grind can get a little tiresome.
The visuals are cute and colourful especially in the design of the Meems, but there is a lack of polish to the game, and things like the in game menus feel bland. The sound design doesn’t do a lot to help, with some annoying sound effects that can be quite unpleasant to the ears.
For me the biggest problem was the core mechanics. They are at times incredibly temperamental, especially in the dungeon interior of The World Tree. The zoomed in perspective makes it difficult to place the bag in the right place, and in turn makes if hard to control the Meems. At times it was like herding smoke!
Hungry Meem is a charming little game, but these issues, although not game breaking, are annoyances that distract from that charm. And, the absence of adequate tutorials doesn’t help early game, as you fumble around trying to master the mechanics.
All in all Hungry Meem is cute, and approachable for those new to the genre, but seasoned gamers may have issues with it’s clumsiness when compared to other games of it’s type. And although the breeding of Meems mechanic offers the opportunity of some replayability, I think most will play once and then move on to the next. Some may find it’s quirks endearing, I however did not.
Hungry Meem is available on Switch, and on Steam for PC, where it is currently 20% off with a price tag of £19.20.
