Eat: The Stanley Parable Meets Food Horror?

An Odd Yet Delicious Feast?

Horror comes in many forms, to the point that not even our own beloved meals are safe from its touch. Granted, whenever we seen any kind of creepy food-related scene in video games, it tends to revolve around grotesque substances or cannibalism. Both are shocking and disturbing, but its rare for this kind of horror to go beyond a quick scare or gag.

Then there’s Eat; a free mobile title that on the surface looks like a generic tapping game designed just to kill some time. Of course, coming from one of the minds behind The Stanley Parable, things are never that simple.

According to an article on Polygon –

Crows Crows Crows, the indie studio behind Justin Roiland’s Accounting and led by The Stanley Parable co-creator William Pugh, released what might be its strangest project to date. Eat is a free mobile game that takes players through a seemingly endless array of food, taunting them the entire way through.

The whole game relies on tapping on a picture of food until it’s all chewed up; a random line of text will then appear in its place. Tap the screen again, then repeat the process with another food item. There’s croissants, hot dogs, French fries, rice — all kinds of good stuff.

At least, there is at first.

The thing about Eat is that it’s anything but the basic, repetitive app that it looks like on the surface. Eat is, in fact, a psychological horror game — in which the player must fight against the unseen force Uncle Hunger, who can only be vanquished through tapping.

“Our intent behind Eat is simple,” lead designer Pugh told Polygon. “Complete and utter disruption of Big Food. Companies like Deliveroo and Foodora have been working together with the notorious scumbag UNCLE HUNGER since the beginning of the Food Chain. It has always been that those who wield the means of production hold the power — but with the release of Eat and its ability to generate infinite food we are passing the power back to the hands of the people. Our intent behind Eat is to permanently and irrevocably change the nature of life as we know it.”