Since we're going by how horrible and ghastly the creatures are, rather than how rad and cool they are, Moonless can't really go anywhere but straight to the bottom. She's a cave wolf that's been transformed by the darkness of her deep subterranean environment, not so much in the evolutionary sense as the "closer to ancient primordial gods" sense. She looks awesome, with her pale ghoulish coloration, four luminous eyes and upper teeth that jut out in such a way that her face almost reminds you of a chainsaw.

She's menacing and she can kill you, but that's true of virtually everything else in the game, and if you throw her bits of rotten meat, she'll be your friend, so actually she is a good girl and not scary at all.

This huge, massive amphibian, on the other hand, will absolutely not be your friend. It feels like one of the most "normal" monsters in the whole game, having no hideous disgusting lore about where it came from and no attacks involving any kind of genitalia, but it's still pretty dreadful, regardless. It will produce a little shimmer to lure you to the water's edge, and it's a fairly tough battle. I really like that it's called "salmonsnake" though, that really feels like the kind of name people might have given this beast if they didn't really have a concept of taxonomy.

This is just a straight up humanoid lizard, like in lots of fantasy role-playing worlds; an ancient species from before humanity, which also lived underground before humanity built Fear and Hunger on top of their homes. Wait, we didn't talk about what Fear and Hunger actually are, did we? They're the names of two gigantic, subterranean prisons!

The lizardmen aren't that awful in and of themselves, but if you're defeated by one, there IS a chance you'll wake up in a meat locker with an arm and both legs chopped off, then the lizardman will come in and skin you alive, and then the game will let you wiggle around on the floor for a while until you die.

This guy looks kind of like a four-armed scarecrow in a trenchcoat, and attacks by blowing poisonous darts. He's actually supposed to be a grave robber who got sealed in a tomb and left to die, but his desperation was heard by one of the setting's various deities, the God of the Depths. This god is the patron of "forsaken" creatures, everything that lives in darkness, and especially of insects. It changed the man into something else, powerful enough to escape, but no longer human. Is that a cloth mask, or his actual face? It's grey and featureless except for dark, black eye holes and a ragged smile, while his hands look either skeletal, or jointed and chitinous!

"Blights" come in pterosaur-like and tyrannosaur-like forms, both of which instill more "cool" than "horror" factor, but both varieties are supposed to be lizardmen who attained these forms through communion with dark gods, and are the only known life in an empty, dark place on the "other side" of reality.

I love that name, it's so "Anime Villain." This unique enemy looks like a big fat copper colored knight with a cage-like helmet and these weird big bell shaped "lantern" arms, which he can use to shatter your bones while also lighting you on fire. He was some sort of famous warrior brought in to help patrol the dungeons, but if you manage to defeat him, his corpse makes a unique hollow, echoing sound, implying that the armor is quite possibly empty. Spooky!

I suppose the God of the Depths is meant to be terrifying, and it certainly is visually! It's a giant mass of organic looking material, covered in thin branches with a huge, nasty-looking yellow mouth, and it just hovers suspended in darkness. Its design is actually inspired by a viral photo of a rusted shipwreck covered in coral, if you know the one! The god represents "revulsion" and "darkness," and as we mentioned earlier, it's most associated with outcasts, undesirables, vermin and pests. It has dominion over invertebrates, and if you earn its favor, you even get the ability to talk to insects! You can see why I ranked it so low; it's ominous, yes, but it's not malevolent. It's an older, more primordial and somewhat weaker being than the other gods, and while it does apparently control the physical layout of the twin dungeons, it's not responsible for all the screwed up stuff they're used for. The God of the Depths did nothing wrong! The God of the Depths will like you if you like bugs! That's gotta be the nicest bestest god you could ask for in this setting!

This used to be a regular guy, Ronn Chambara, but he was one of several people who ascended to godhood, resulting in a newer, hipper pantheon of more "human" gods, instead of the ancient monstrous ones of the void. Bunch of good-for-nothing punks if you ask me. Real gods represent things like "spiders" and "fear of vast spaces" and "scrabbling in pits!"

Ronn is kind of pretentious, too; a tormented poet who believes so strongly in suffering for his art, he became a god of pure torture. A skinless, mouthless figure that wallows in a giant pool of blood where Hellraiser chains yank on his guts, stuff like that. Seen that all before, really; it's cool and all, yeah, and sure as hell fits the setting, but other gods in the game are either more delightful or more disturbing, so he's smack dab in between two of them!

Gro-goroth is one of several gods in the Fungerverse, the embodiment of destruction and of human sacrifice. He like all these original gods was born from a particular "green hue" you can see around the void (the one with the dinosaurs) collecting like liquid in huge pools, and I love how abstract a concept that is. The Gods are just things that came to be out of some...stuff? Some greenness? That's it? Wow. Gro-Goroth apparently gifted blood magic to humanity, but his power is beginning to fade away because humans don't properly understand or respect the original gods, and so they've begun to abandon the world of mankind. They do, however, have "traces" left behind, still powerful but less so.

The original, true form of Gro-goroth is depicted in a book as a burly, shaggy, winged demon with a small, blindfolded human head and a nude, headless torso bound to his waist. The "trace" he's left behind has a similar overall body shape formed from corpse flesh, but with no visible legs, and it's got a random scattering of massive eyeballs! This is all fairly scary and epic and all, but, it's nothing we haven't really seen before in cosmic gods and demons.

Seemingly references to Lovecraft's King in Yellow, the yellow mages are cultist followers of Gro-Goroth wrapped in bright yellow cloth, and if you're anywhere near one, without even entering battle, they'll cast their favorite magic spell, "Hurting," which simply dematerializes one of your arms or legs. Hilarious. Losing a leg in this game actually causes you to move slower, either for the rest of the game or until you get one of a few rare opportunities to rejuvenate yourself.

So then there's the Yellow Lizardmage, a combination of "human" yellow mage and lizard-person with a highly uncanny appearance; a weirdly-proportioned human with a couple of more reptilian limbs and a long thick neck.

Cave Gnomes are aesthetically more cute than disturbing, just tiny little humanoids with a big head, large wing-like hands and a skin surface resembling grey, cracked stone. They're common but extremely weak, only posing a threat as they keep calling for help and potentially overwhelm a weaker player character. You can also try talking to them, though all you can do is briefly confuse them by typing "kueh-!" or imitating their warning cry, "KAAW KAAW," which just calls even more to the fight.

Deeper underground, though, you can find a cliff littered with stone-like eggs, and you can stomp around squishing them if you like, but that will piss off the Cavemother. She's a huge Cavegnome with a more mature looking face, with eerie closed eyes and a second vestigial face sprouting out of her neck. She also his big floppy rock breasts you can chop off during battle, if you want her to stop attracting more offspring. You can also find a Cavemother chained to a cavern wall that you can "milk," if you want a vial of "yellow mucus." Delicious! Lore states that she longs to be impregnated by a human, which implies she's been mating with something else, but we don't know what.

Anyway, I love this design concept for "gnomes." Their physical appearance in folklore was originally ambiguous, and they were simply small spirits associated with Earth.

Unpleasant little fellas! These inhabitants of the lost city of Ma'habre look like human faces, bleeding from their eyes and nostrils, that scurry around on four humanoid limbs. They attack only by "poking" at first, but then they can also swell up and burst with acid! Rotten little scamps!

An early enemy in the dungeons, Maneba are like fleshy jellyfish that walk around on their long tentacles and have subtly human-like faces. You can actually talk to them during battle, and they'll answer your questions as broad concepts flooding your character's mind. From this, we learn that they originate from the void and the green hue, much like the gods, and that it's "nothing personal," but it does need to absorb your lifeforce.

So they don't seem like really bad folk, but you still want to avoid them. If you don't, they can use an "inject" attack with their tentacles, and it leaves you infested with worms. I wonder how that ties into their biology? Are they just transmitting their own parasites, or do they have a more mutual symbiosis going on? Or are those baby Maneba???

The Black Witch is a vassal of Gro-Goroth who generates her very own pocket dimension, which you can randomly slip into by falling through the floor. It's just a few foggy rooms where she'll occasionally float around you, cackling, until you've been there long enough that she initiates a battle. Like many enemies in the game, there are no rewards worth fighting her for, so she exists to just be yet another problem.

She has a fairly neat design; she has a bald head with no nose, pale glowing eyes, pointed ears and sharp teeth, a bit "Nosferatu Vampire" or bat-person, if you ask me. She also has this thing resembling a fat, blackish earthworm draped around her shoulders, and a "dress" made from more of these "worms," or maybe big millipedes? Fancy!

This is a pretty interesting concept for a monster; it's a physical manifestation of the "grudge" felt by your own character for the horrors they encountered in the dungeons. It's a humanoid figured covered in wrinkly white flesh, with a featureless head except for the x-shaped gash where an eye would be, and faint depressions where a mouth should go. It appears to have a heart on the outside of its chest, and its malformed arms are shaped into large, winglike blades of flesh and bone. Extremely badass, and can't be faulted for existing. The poor thing is just upset!

This might be my favorite monster in the game? It's a warty yellow pod surrounded by pale pink, triangular petals and has a little cluster of roots, an appropriate design for a parasitic plant, which will typically lack all chlorophyll and consist of little more than the flowering body! It functions more like a contagious status effect, and any character "pollinated" by it becomes uncontrollable in combat, just as likely to hurt themselves or their allies.

So mechanically speaking, I guess it's not really a creature or monster, but it's presented as one and gets its own little sprite, and I love when a monster has a less conventional presence like that. It reminds me of the days when official Dungeons and Dragons materials would include not only tiny parasites, but even fantastical viral infections among "monster" entries!

"THE DOOM AND TERROR OF MODERN MAN" as he calls himself, Nassy is an all-powerful dark wizard who consists of only a disembodied floating head with some nasty, dangling gore. You encounter him in a dungeon completely full of skinless, rotting human carrion he floats up out of, and if you enter battle, he'll summon a horned, gigantic ogre-like beast that gets closer and closer, turn by turn, until it kills you instantly.

All fairly terrifying, but Nas'hrah will always let you run away from the fight, and he's also one of the most powerful and desirable characters you can recruit to your side. He oddly enough isn't considered a party member, even though he'll tag along and fight with you and everything. He never does use that insta-death monster spell again, though, which seems like it might have been really helpful.

One of the deadliest and strongest monsters in the game, the Crow Mauler is Funger's own homage to Silent Hill's Pyramid Head, a similarly relentless and almost undefeatable stalker-figure, in this case distinguished by an eerie crow head on a human body with a spike-covered bar for an arm.

Crow Mauler is actually given a full backstory, having once been a knight named Rudimer, who lead an effort to purge the dungeons of Fear and Hunger of "depravity" and restore them to order. This failed, obviously, as he too was overtaken by the darkness of the gods and transformed into a monster; one that's still just trying to "purge" everything that doesn't belong.

You can also encounter a two-headed Crow Mauler, but is this also Rudimer? That's not quite as clear. I placed the mauler a bit higher up the list for its exceptional threat factor, but it doesn't quite have the grossness or uncanniness to compete with some of what's coming.

Seemingly a former human, "Butterfly" is undergoing some kind of transformation in order to win the blessing of the God of the Depths. Now a grey-skinned, hunched figure with sad, solid black eyes, a large blue proboscis, and bloody "wing nubs" on its back.

You can talk to the Butterfly, who mostly just says things like "I'm going to be a beautiful butterfly!"...or you can attack and kill the butterfly, as it pleads to be left alone. There's no reason you should want to do this, but if you're able to talk to insects, the king of cockroaches - who is also a cockroach - will actually ask you to kill the Butterfly, for whatever reason. It's hard to say no to a cute little roach who thinks so highly of himself, but the Butterfly also seems to be truly innocent, as far as we know.

Later, you'll encounter some young gods who will tell you something about any enemy or character in the game, and they claim the Butterfly's goal is futile. Yet, if you meet certain conditions, the Butterfly will be gone, and your character will "hear distant flapping." Personally I would love to see if it really literally turned into a butterfly or just into something that looks kind of like a butterfly. You can't usually hear a butterfly's wings, for one.

Butterfly is a bit higher up the list because there's certainly a kind of horror to the creature, even if it doesn't subject anyone or anything else to any harm. It's the horror of something just so pitiful, I guess, something willing to undergo such an abnormal transformation just in the blind hope that it can become something better.

COOL looking creatures, mumblers have human bodies with grimy grey clothing and jointed doll-like limbs, but their heads are just swollen, warty purple polyps, with a cluster of finger-like oral tentacles in the "greater" mumbler. The lesser mumbler also has a long, thick metal neck brace that gives its head an exceptionally phallic look, but that doesn't make it look any less badass, either. Not even when a god will later remark on how "erect" these creatures are, or when the tip of their head explodes during battle. They are apparently people who became completely mindless vessels of the God of the Depths, but have since broken free, with "unkown ambitions." Or perhaps they gained more independent sentience as the poor god began fading from our world?

In any case, you can really see the influence of Silent Hill and Bloodborne in these figures.

This is an unsettling and fascinating one in several ways. The Lady of the Moon comes from The Green and communicates in your mind, just like the Maneba, though she looks more like an actual literal giant jellyfish with three feminine human heads under her transparent bell. You can fight her, but she doesn't attack at all, and is easily defeated. If you only speak to her, she offers to replenish your entire party, missing limbs and all, in exchange for only one thing: a little girl you might have found held prisoner in the dungeons. She says the moon god wants the girl, but won't say why.

This is another of those younger gods, who all either died or retired from power pretty quickly. Valtiel, who pursues knowledge, is responsible for much of what you encounter in the lost city area, and manifests as a giant head with an exposed brain. During combat, this brain eventually grows a big thingadoodle on top, yes it looks like a donger, with a single eyeball. Subtle! This is because Valtiel is also a pervert. He's actually so ashamed of being defeated that he kills himself, but if you have Nas'hrah with you, he'll tell you that's fine because Valtiel was a child predator anyway. You can see why he's high on the list, though as a monster encounter he doesn't do anything too grisly; leave that to his "creations," which we'll come to shortly.

Another enemy that feels very Silent Hill, molded resemble lumpy, faceless imitations of human bodies. The legs are almost right, if slightly crooked, but everything above the waist looks sort of fused together and twisted, not unlike Silent Hill's Lying Figures. They're found around the Void, wandering aimlessly or floundering on the ground, and also like the Lying Figures, they can spurt acid! They don't actively come after you, however, or really seem to have any direction at all. They are the result of an unknown, younger god attempting and failing to create its own version of humanity, before that god evidently faded back out of existence and left its miserable, unfinished creations behind. SICK. I mean...SAD! Mean :( Like absolutely raw as hell story but awww :(

Fear and Hunger is a difficult game, as we established, where you can't actually get any more powerful through any kind of leveling system. It's also a game in which you can permanently lose body parts and have very few options to heal them.

"Fortunately," there's a single solution to all of these problems: at one of just a few ritual circles in the game, you can "show love" to any other adult human in your party, even a zombie! If you do, yes, you will get to see your ten or fifteen pixels humping another ten or fifteen pixels, and then, you'll be "married," which means....you fuse together into an entirely new being, bald and bone-white, regaining any severed limbs and growing significantly in combat power.

It's useful, obviously, but even having to do this to survive is bleak enough, the whole concept of it is pretty grotesque and there's something especially grim about the loss of identity. You chose one of four starting characters with their own distinct story, but the brutality of the dungeons drives you to sacrifice who you even are, becoming this blank slate of a being whose only goal now is to finish what its two components started.

And if you're desperate enough to do it once more, you become a full-blown monstrosity, the "Abominable" Marriage!

Last warning: we're getting into the just plumb AWFUL stuff here, and maybe you've noticed that your scroll bar is barely at the halfway point. Uterus is an artificial humanoid reminiscent of an anatomical model, if the anatomy was mostly all wrong; the yellow, mouthless head reminds you almost of a lego figure, if it was a bit fleshier. It has similarly yellow breasts poking out from between completely alien looking "bones," it has a fetus visibly curled up in its hollow stomach, and then it just has curvy human legs in black stockings. These creatures are the creations of an NPC, Valtiel, for implicit purposes of "physical pleasure," and that may or may not also include the fetus, which actually has the face of an old man and can crawl out of its mannequin-mom on a long umbilical cord.

Every single thing about this is horrible and it still only made roughly the middle of our list, mostly because the Uterus and its offspring are confirmed to be both mindless and soulless. So they're neither depraved villains nor suffering victims, as far as we know, but mindless automota. Really icky, mindless automata.

An lipless, white-skinned ghoul with oversized claws, razor sharp spines and small, black horns in place of eyes, Night Lurch isn't the weirdest or most original design in the game, no, but it definitely earns a higher placement than Uterus. It used to be a human, and he was a serial predator who simply thrilled at attacking women. He was very rightfully condemned to the dungeons, but maybe it still wasn't a good idea, since the darkness transformed him into a ravenously violent embodiment of all his sadism and lust. Also, this is the first enemy in our list with an attack that causes the Rectal Bleeding status effect.

Fortunately, he's mindless and animalistic enough that you can feed him rotting meat to distract him for an entire turn, during which you're free to chop his arms and legs off.

Pocketcat looks like a human wearing dapper white boots and a purple, grinning Cheshire Cat mask, so named because he always has one hand in his front pocket. I uh, already can't say I like that. In fact, you can find a storybook that alludes to him as a sort of bogeyman figure, and it mentions his hand jerking up and down a lot. Lovely. Super.

So Pocketcat is a "shopkeeper" who can give you some of the best things in the game, but the only thing he'll accept as payment is a child. It's not explicitly for the terrible reasons we might think, per se, because while he may seem to just be some random human pervert, you can uncover some clues that he's an entity created by the moon god, just like that jellyfish lady, and the moon god just seeks children as potential vessels, or something like that. It may be that Pocketcat WAS a human pervert, however, and simply became a servant of the moon, because if you kill him and examine him in the second game (there's an entire, second game, in case I hadn't mentioned that yet) you'll find he's actually an old corpse, and the cat mask is permanently fused to its head.

Resembling bald, grey-skinned children with black horns curling out of their eye sockets - intentionally similar to the night lurch, whatever that implies - Demon Kids are optional party members who aren't very strong, but can at least learn magic, and can also be sacrificed to anything that demands a tasty delicious child, so there's that! They're demons anyway, you can't very well feel TOO bad about it, can you? You should probably feel more bad about creating them to begin with, because you do so through a spell that allows you to knock up a dead body.

This is another creation of Valtiel, just like the Uterus, but this thing is completely organic and sapient, even if it's supposedly an "accident" or "failure" in Valtiel's attempts to master the creation of life. It's a hulking, pale white apelike man, mostly covered in matted, shaggy white hair except for an all-too human face with an expression not quite happy, not quite pained. No eyes can be seen in the dark sockets, and thankfully it wears pants, but it gets its name from just how horrible it stinks.

If you're defeated by Valtiel, it will simply drag you off somewhere in the abandoned city it haunts. We don't know for what purpose and probably don't want to, but it's not smart enough to actually lock you up or anything. You can just kind of walk back out, the problem being that you'll have to find the rest of your party again.

This ghastly being is encountered at the end of a dream sequence, initially in the form of a little old lady working a spinning wheel in the dark, which is ominous enough. During battle, she'll transform into a mass of wooden wheels, furniture legs and cloth with multiple jointed, wooden limbs and a horrible, sneering wooden head. For one of her attacks, she actually peels off the player's face, then wears it as a stretched-out mask. She's apparently a mythical bogeyman figure from the cold Northern region, where one of the main characters hails from.

I ranked Ronn the Tormented One fairly low, because he was just kind of a rad torture-god, but I have to place one of his "minions" much, much higher. The Red Man is evidently what happens if a human being is tortured by Ronnie for centuries straight; now a giant with raw, peeled looking flesh and vestigial facial features, like an unfinished clay sculpture, dragging itself by its arms and occasionally shrieking - one of the harshest and most startling sounds in the game.

We don't know any more about who exactly becomes something like this, or why, but the impression I get is that the decades of constant injury, constantly healed over, are what would have not only blurred this poor soul's features but grown them to such obscenely unnatural proportions. Either way, a divine torture victim becoming this oversized thing that exists only to suffer - and looks like it - is a truly horrendous concept, and might remind you of I have no Mouth and I must Scream, though this is kind of exactly the opposite. It has a mouth, at least, a big black vertical hole where its mouth once was, and all it can really do is scream.

In Fungerland, Sylvian is the ancient primordial goddess of life, love and reproduction; a fertility goddess who gifted the world with "flower magic." So why is she so much higher on the list than the god of violence and death? The one with the blood magic? Sylvian isn't cruel, no, in fact she's the true creator of humankind and she adores them! Whenever any humans express love or sexuality, it makes her proud, even the disturbing cult orgies thrown by her most fanatical adherents. You get the impression these old gods are almost childish and naive, really, like well-meaning beasts who barely understand us, as much as they'd like to, more tragic than malevolent.

Sylvian is actually also a pretty sorrowful goddess, mostly because humanity is incapable of even a fraction the love she's capable of experiencing, and especially unable to give back any of her love under normal circumstances...but that's why she bestowed upon us that "flower magic," which we've already seen, because its most powerful spell is The Marriage. When you get so busy you melt into a single fleshbeast, that's your meager human vessel coming one tiny step closer to what Sylvian truly represents, and it makes her even prouder of you!

She's depicted as a humanlike figure with dozens of breasts and a phallic forehead, but this might be artistic license, since the "trace" she leaves behind is far, far less human:

This might be my favorite monster design in the game. It still has a suggestive "mushroom cap" sort of head, and it has two conical breasts, but the rest of the being is just a fleshless ribcage and some tentacle arms, the whole huge thing lying on its back, and its only facial features are the luminous white eye-lights and a ring of chitinous mandibles under the "cap." You can see the aspects of humanity in there, but also something that existed long before us; something that may have existed to be the fertility goddess of this world's earliest Cambrian worms and slugs and proto-arthropoda. Truly an embodiment of nature's prosperity, in that there's arguably a little bit of every major animal phylum somewhere in the mix.

During battle against this entity, it can attack by growing a slimy green copy of your main character!

Haha, oh boy. So at one time, Fear and Hunger - the dungeons, not the game - still had normal human prison guards, but as the shit began hitting the fan, those that hadn't turned into various other monsters tried to survive by performing, if you hadn't guessed, that lovely flower magic from the love goddess nature mommy. I guess they thought if they all did it at once, they'd be an EXTRA powerful Marriage, but all they did was turn into a huge round blob of bodies. This mass seems helpless to move of its own volition, still occupying its birthplace and demanding every passerby to feed it human flesh. This is yet another thing in the game that just wants you to sacrifice The Girl, but if you do, you get absolutely nothing at all in return.

This entire monster exists to present you a horrible choice, then teach you that not every choice in this game will come with a reward. You can battle and kill the hydra surprisingly easy, because its only means of "fighting" is to keep insulting you, but you also won't get a single thing from your victory, either. I put it high up on the list because it is a big blob made out of a mass orgy that eats kids, but by this game's standards, it's almost a comic relief character. I especially like that when you refuse to feed it, it always says it will let you go "just this once."

This is another thing that wanders Ma'Habre, like the Scarabs, or the creations of Valtiel. It has a humanlke face, but on a body more like a small, cracked wooden log with incredibly long, thin, jointed arms and legs, like a stick insect. During battle, the Harvestman will either "whistle" at the player or "pet" them, neither of which does any harm, but after the third turn it'll try to actually grab you, and then there's a 50% chance you will instantly die.

This is because the Harvestman wants to "satisfy" you, but for whatever reason, it thinks this entails breaking all of your limbs and then "harvesting" your genitalia. This is shown in a special animation, albeit with the tiny overworld sprites, so it's not exactly explicit, but I feel like I shouldn't put it here. I mean, it's still a monster reaching a hand into the crotch of a little pixel person. Anyway, this seems to be the monster everyone considers the actual worst, though oddly enough, there's a possible scene in which a Harvestman will kidnap The Girl, the nearly mute little kid you can have in your party, and won't actually harm her. Instead you can find the two just sitting together, the Harvestman patting her on the head. Seems fine! Nothing to worry about!

These are the first major enemies of the dungeon, the most infamous in the game, and the first ones I truly had to censor. Some people would rather not play this game because of these guys alone, and they're why some youtube reviews and playthroughs also had to make edits in order to stay up. Lots of enemies have phalluses in this game, yes, or just plain human crotches flopping around, though they're usually less graphic than even what you'll see at a run-of-the-mill art museum. The huge, troll-like prison guards, on the other hand, have """stingers""" that reach all the way to the ground, and if a prison guard defeats you, the game will sometimes cut to where it dragged you back to one of the cells, and you have to watch the bastard go to town a bit on your overworld sprite until he's had his fun. Then the game tells you that you're bleeding to death - you know where, we've established this - and lets you slowly crawl around, but you'll die no matter what.

It's the nastiest thing in the whole game, and can happen your very first few minutes, setting the tone for all the misery to come. But perhaps the funniest thing in the game is that, in one of these cells, while you're still pulling your bloodied body around the filthy floor......your character might pick up a "lucky coin" before they finally pass out.

This huge humanoid has the distinct face of a cave wolf, like moonless, with a mouth that extends all the way down the front of the body like a zipper. COOL visual! But how did this being come to exist? Indeed, how in this setting did one of the prison guards and a monstrous dog merge into one body? I guess it's a mystery!

By now, we've mentioned the Girl several times. You can find this scared, traumatized, mute child locked in a cage in the dungeons, and you can keep her with you all the way to the end...with some effort. She can't do much in a fight, except that she may try to sacrifice herself to prevent you from dying. Numerous people and things want you to give up or kill her, sometimes for an actual reward, sometimes as just a mean trick. She can also just die in combat, of course, and this is a game where death is permanent, unless you use up one of only a couple chances to revive someone. She'll also repeatedly succumb to fear and try to stay behind, which you can only mitigate by using up the same precious resources you depend on to keep your own mind in one piece.

Basically, getting the girl to the end of your adventure is a test of patience that makes the entire experience that much harder, but it sure seems important, and we all want to do the right thing, right? It's hard to let even an imaginary child suffer or die, even just in pixels and code. And even if you don't succumb to that immersion, you probably want to see how this plays out anyway, yeah? You can even ask those young punk gods about her, and they'll imply she has a divine purpose! Such a difficult yet noble task must yield the biggest rewards and most positive, wholesome ending, shouldn't it?

WELL.

Make no mistake, this IS important, and it is arguably the "correct" outcome of the whole game, since the sequel game continues from this very timeline, but "Ending A" is triggered when you bring the girl to the deepest, oldest possible place in your world: inside the God of the Depths. There, at the edge of a cliff formed from entangled corpses, the girl will be drawn towards the absolute blackness beyond existence, and her little body will collapse and contort, and your battle against The God of Fear and Hunger will begin.

In her second phase, she transforms into the shape of a nude, armless adult woman, kind of like the Venus de Milo, but made of weird rubbery skin instead of marble.

In the third phase, she regains misshapen arms and legs, but with a big gaping black cavity from her groin to chest. Great. Pleasant. Swell. Her mannequin-like body also seems to be cracking apart everywhere as it grows, and with each transformation, you're told that she's in "grueling pain" and "cold."

Her fourth form is the most grotesque; she has the head of a slightly older human woman, with long hair and what look like gouged-out eyes, though her expression seems kind of happy? The rest of her body is a flaring, conical shape formed from many pairs of arms, between them a black void with some sort of segmented, wood or leather strip hanging out of it.

Her very final and apparently truest shape doesn't even look like a living being anymore. It's an extremely simplified and abstracted humanoid effigy, a cracked wooden boulder-like "body" with a lumpy knob of a head and sticklike arms draped in a couple more of those ribbon things, actually looking quite a bit like Silent Hill 3's Glutton! But even in this form, we're told this newborn god is "trembling in pain."

After this battle, you find yourself once again injured to the point of helplessness, only capable of crawling before the strange idol that is the god's physical form. She speaks to you, sympathetically, about how your journey was always going to be a one-way trip, but that "there is beauty in this darkness," and that it's time for you to lie down and rest, having served your true purpose as she "ushers something new."

In this ending's closing dialog, you're told that you played a vital role in bringing this new god into the world, one whose power is as great as any of the ancient deities, and one we're told will end the "cruel age," bringing mankind to an era of relative enlightenment.

I have to place The God of Fear and Hunger herself at the top of the list, because she may not do any weird stuff to your butt or give you pinworms or peel you like a banana or eat babies or even technically mean any harm at all, but it's quite the gut-punch to fight your way through so, so much, all the while keeping this defenseless little girl safe and happy and as healthy as one possibly can be in this game, only to discover that you were an expendable stepping stone. It's allegedly a great achievement, but one you'll never be remembered for. You never even get to see the outside or get any final moment of peace for your efforts. You suffer, starve, suffer, lose your mind, starve, suffer, get manhandled by weird things, contract various diseases, suffer more and eat maggot-ridden garbage just to cling to life by any thread you can grasp on this whole miserable quest, and while the rest of the world gets a new god, your final honor is to die in agony in the deepest, darkest hole of the whole horrible nightmare you were fighting to escape, entirely because you did right but what you believed was a normal, innocent child. She's grateful to you, in her own way, but in the end you're still little more than a bug to this entity's vastness.

...And just how well does that new god work out? How much more enlightened is humanity, after all that? Well, I've actually kept myself relatively unspoiled on Fear and Hunger 2, but it can't be all that much enlightenment, or there probably couldn't have been a Fear and Hunger 2.

And the WORST part? The VERY worst part???

The lovable, beautiful God of the Depths, who only wanted everything to be bugs and dirt, is destroyed in this process. The new god's birth consumes the last of its power, like some parasitoid wasp emerging from its host. Maybe depthsy would at least appreciate that comparison.