Hello all.
Here i was, looking for a good management game in the style of This War of Mine when i found Ravenous Devils. And what a different theme this game has!
About
Ravenous Devils is a side-scrolling, horror, cooking/tailor-shop simulator, set in poor, crime-ridden 19th's century London, where a couple of cannibals have figured out a way to make a living by killing some of their shop's customers and then re-selling their victims' clothes and cocking their bodies to the rest of their oblivious customers.
A gruesome theme for sure.
But, their surviving customers love their shop, being completely oblivious that what they are being fed, and crave so much is human flesh.
You, the player, play as theses shops owners; a couple that besides being, well, serial killers, do this with the primary intent of getting rich.
Gameplay
As the objective of the game, you try to make your customers happy, by cooking them what they ask, quickly, and by always keeping clothing available for them to buy.
Making sure that there's always a fresh, healthy quantity of corpses to allow the shops to run!
After closing-time, at the end of each day, you can upgrade your shops' equipment, improve the selection of dishes (by unlocking new recipes) and change the shop's look, as you see fit; all in turn to make more profit.
Modes
The game has two modes; Story Mode and Endless Mode.
In Story Mode, you get to manage the shops, while following the short story of a stranger who keeps sending the shop owners letters, every few days.
What on earth could he be telling the shop owners in these letters?
While the story is short (somewhere between 4 and 6 hours perhaps), it is entertaining enough. And it helps counter the tiny bit of repetitiveness this mode can create at times. This because this mode is not hard to beat, as a way to give the story more importance.
The difficulty side of the game is left to the Endless Mode. In this mode you try to keep the shops open for as long as you can. The mode has a few extra mechanics you will not find in story mode, which gives the game that difficulty setting.
Theme
Obviously, the theme of this game is a dark one, and do expect explicit violence and gore.
But, it's presented through the eyes of the playable characters - the shop owners - who are dark by nature, so the atmosphere is a light one.
You, the player, are the only one who has to stomach what you're doing to the customers, because the shop owners are having a great time making their shops succeed, literally "killing it"!
Huh!! Good pun, right?!
Final Thoughts
It's a fun, but short game that will keep you entertained for a few hours.
That's the bottom line.
It's appealing enough that i recommend this game, and that i find myself feeling that it is unfortunate that there's not more complexity to the game.
Because the game's got humor in it's horrific theme and has an appealing gameplay and a fun vibe. But it falls shorter than i'd liked, with easily unlockable items and low level of complexity, making the repetitiveness settle in very quickly, especially in Endless Mode, which while harder, it does not offer that much greater level of difficulty.
The only objective there being to see how many days one can keep the shops open.
But like i said, the bottom line is that it's a fun game, with the caveat that it's only fun while it lasts!
Thanks for reading!