Human Fast Food Review (PC)

It’s time to brush up on your allergen awareness skills, folks — there’s a new ingredient in town. Forget about peanuts and dairy, it’s all about meat from here on out—human meat, might I add. Oh, the days of beef jerky and chicken nuggets are long, long gone. Here, in this moment, it’s all about filling another gullet with a different source of protein—a rather monstrous gullet that doesn’t take too kindly too undercooked flesh, at that. It’s Human Fast Food, the questionable cuisine that requires little to zero condiments aside from the occasional sachet of bone marrow. If that’s the sort of diet you could stomach, then pull up a plastic chair and sit with us a short while — we’re about to make sausage patties with a pensioner’s intestines.

If you’ve played the likes of Ravenous Devils in the past, then you’ll no doubt have already mustered up the best possible interest in niche simulation games—IP that stretches out to this rather peculiar, albeit somewhat grotesque kitchen nightmare. It isn’t vastly different from RD, though it does break the habit of reverting back to Sweeney Todd to find its inspiration. To put it simply, you won’t find any barbershops, Victorian tailors, or any hidden pie-making machines, for that matter. But you will, however, find a cavern of glutinous monsters, an underground restaurant with a questionable taste in decor, and a lot of rotting corpses who would happily sacrifice their left legs to make one heck of a fillet for your gobbledygook clientele.

If you’ve made it this far, then I can only imagine that you have an interest in dark fantasy and odd concepts. And that’s great, because to be perfectly honest with you, it’s about to get a lot weirder. Check, please?

This Meat Tastes Funny

The good news is, Human Fast Food isn’t anywhere near as gore-addled as, say, SAW or Dead Space. In fact, if you were to remove the human remains from the platter, then you would actually have quite a nice, almost cozy restaurant simulator. Oh, this isn’t the gore fest that you might’ve expected it to be. As it turns out, it’s more of a serendipitous affair—the sort of game that you could quite easily hack bodies to and feel absolutely no remorse whatsoever. I say that, not because it’s built on sunshine and rainbows, but because it makes a conscious choice to obscure the unwarranted need to generate violence in order to centerline another key component: management.

Human Fast Food is as much about developing your underground tourist spot as it is completing orders and sourcing fresh ways to make better delicacies. It’s a lot like the traditional business simulation game, in the sense that, in order for you to progress, you must gradually work to unlock better equipment, earn cash for more favors, and expand your cookbook to include more ingredients and recipes of an even greater value. And that’s really all the game is: building a restaurant in the darkest crevices of an underground world, and using the power of human meat and other unorthodox ingredients to elevate your empire.

The No Salad Rule

Vegetarians needn’t concern themselves with finding a table at this establishment, given that the menu is entirely carnivorous and dripping in blood. Thanks to the clients that you host in Human Fast Food, though, their appetite isn’t quite as fussy as the usual dietitian. Here, you have just one goal: fill the gobs of the gloop with whatever meat you have in your storeroom, and then use their cash to fund even more extravagant enterprises, like better grinding machines to boost your output, or new appliances to help create new products to serve at the front of house. Regardless of how far along you are in this quest for dominance, at no point during the journey are you expected to do anything more than what is in front of you. To that end, I’d say that the majority of the game is pretty straightforward and, dare I say, relaxing.

With all of the above said, there are a few minor inconveniences for you to shovel through here, like the goblins that raid your stores like clockwork. If, say, these tedious pests weren’t a factor in the whole ordeal, then chances are I myself would’ve spent a lot more time with Human Fast Food. But as it turned out, I ended up spending a lot of time not building on the experience, but restoring the damages that the goblins kept stacking up for no reason other than to drain my patience. A minor thing, for sure, but it definitely dampened an otherwise enjoyable culinary journey.

Verdict

Human Fast Food won’t make you sick to your core, but it will give you another reason to fear the patties that you might order from your local burger joint. Alas, this isn’t your gore-obsessed restaurant, but an establishment of a superior quality—the kind of place that you would take another monster out on a date. What I mean is that, contrary to popular perception, Human Fast Food isn’t the type of game to incubate knots in your stomach; it’s the sort that you could quite easily unwind to over a cup of coffee and a (not) meat pie. With a simple yet satisfying gameplay loop there to keep you hooked, you needn’t fret about sweating bullets over infinite rolls of orders or fleshing out your restaurant with all of the best possible cosmetics. And that’s great, given that the food industry is universally known for being brash.

Of course, if you enjoy simple yet repetitive tasks and bite-sized progression tropes, then I imagine that you’ll enjoy the idea of rustling up an infinite amount of human sausages in Human Fast Food. It isn’t as fleshed out as several other restaurant-centric titles, I’ll admit, what with its visuals being a little worse for wear and its monster design lacking that extra oomph. Nevertheless, what you have here is an incredibly fun and quirky cooking and management sim. Sure, it’s a little “out there” and unorthodox, but the fact still remains: Human Fast Food is a sickeningly good game, warts and all.