Percival and Hildred are a match made in hell. The two playable characters in Ravenous Devils, he runs the tailor shop on the top floor, she cooks in the cellar kitchen, and locals flock to the cafe in between to grab delicious snacks. We rarely get to see happy couples in the world of gaming, so even if Percival and Hildred are murdering innocents and then serving their flesh to unsuspecting customers, it's great to see their relationship thriving.
If you're going to eat meat, it's important to know where your food is coming from. In Ravenous Devils it's coming from the people who visit the tailor shop. Percival is as handy with a blade as he is with a needle, and Hildred is the Julia Child of cannibalism. It's a new take on a cooking sim, to be sure, and is absolutely gleeful in its gory mechanics.
Pleased to meat you
The Sweeney Todd style gameplay is simple but increasingly frantic. At the top of your screen in Percival's tailor's shop. He needs to commit murders, sew clothes to sell, clean up the blood and drop the corpses down a hatch. The middle level of your screen is where customers will come for your pies and sausages, and the very bottom is Hildred's kitchen, where she'll collect the bodies Percival sends her way. Then it's just a case of mincing them, stuffing them into sausages, or hacking at them with a cleaver to make steaks. In some ways, the game has a very wholesome message about recycling.
There are just so many deliciously wicked details wrapped up in the simple actions. You can adopt a cat, and if you take a moment to give it a cuddle between baking it will bring you a dead rat. These are incredibly useful to keep customers happy if you run out of people pate. As you progress through the game you can unlock new equipment, like extra ovens, and recipes to add to your menu. Percival eventually turns the attic floor into a greenhouse, adding vegetables and eggs to your supplies, but also posing a dilemma. You need bodies for compost to grow the plants, so that means sacrificing a lot of long pig. Potatoes or people, it's a tricky choice.
Offally good
As well as giving you upgrades to keep you toiling in the kitchens, there's also a story to pull you through the game. As sinister events unfold the happy couple gets increasingly threatening letters, encounter some of the more odd and influential locals, and you can even employ a plucky youngster called Joshua to serve customers.
Goth girlfriend that I am, I was less bothered by the letters or the story, and just obsessed with running the most efficient tailor-abattoir-cafe that I could and chuckling gleefully at just how gruesome the animations are. Honestly, invest in the steak preparation table and marvel at just how much attention to detail there is in the decapitation, limb removal, and stomach steak extraction. It makes Resident Evil look like a kiddie cartoon.
If you've got a strong stomach, a sick sense of humor, and get your kicks from management sims like Diner Dash, Ravenous Devils will give you a taste of the genre you've never experienced before.
Ravenous Devils is out now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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