izigame.me

Dread Hunger is a social deception game (comparable to TTT) with hardcore survival aspects. You are part of a British explorer crew who set sails for a long journey to the Arctic (probably Alaska, Canada or Greenland) - playing during 1845. While the crew of eight people is trying their best to survive by finding coal (to run the ship) and food as well as nitroglycerin to blow up deadly icebergs there are two thralls among them who will use dark magic trying to sabotage the expedition.
The game is dead. But why?
The official game servers will be shut down on January 1st 2024 so it is not worth buying it anymore. But what exactly is the reason? I'll make two groups of people responsible for this. One of them are the developers who gave up on their quite successful game with a unique concept out of pure laziness. The game only featured three maps in total. After leaving Early Access they never added anything new to the gameplay. Only paid cosmetics were introduced and embedded with the help of NPCs who kept advertising orbs, rings, masks, carpets, crockery and pelts to bypassing players. At first I welcomed the creative integration of micro transactions to the game but at some point the repetitive voice lines that played three times a minute started to become annoying.
During the time they added those cosmetic DLCs they also increased the base game price by a lot hoping to fight the loss of money caused by a shrinking player base. However, this was ultimately the reason the game started to die besides various community created problems. Those were mainly caused by the fact 95 % of all players where Chinese who would either kick you out of their lobby (if you haven't had Chinese letters in your username or your play time embedded in it) or hardly used any English making them intelligible to the rest of the world. And if they did they were usually telling everyone how bad Japan was even though literally NO ONE EVER ASKED. As a newcomer your life would be hell when playing with foreigners who got thousands of hours on their clock always suspecting you of doing something malicious while in reality you are just trying to figure out how to craft, repair, find coal and so on. At some point the whole player base felt more like a gated community than a welcoming place for the unexperienced.
My experience as an Achievement Hunter
As a Steam achievement hunter who just bought the game a few weeks ago during the final sale (and is suffering chronically from FOMO) this game left me with kind of mixed feelings. While I really loved the concept of the game (and its implementation) playing with foreigners was a true hell ride. During the first sessions I was able to play with other achievement hunters helping each others to get the probably hardest achievements. This, however, never included playing the game as intended and so the learning curve was pretty much flat.
For the last few achievements (being the captain of a ship for 10 nautical miles was definitely the hardest one) it was unavoidable to play in public lobbies. You really ought to leave the lobby immediately if the Captain role is already taken. People usually wouldn't tolerate other roles driving the ship. You would get a bit of a different experience if you explain the case to them (= you are aiming to unlock a certain achievement) which my unsocial self obviously didn't do right away. But even if you were allowed to do so people wouldn't be exactly amused if you didn't play the game as intended. This fact - along with the immense time pressure - made me stay up for 60 hours straight to get that final achievement before heading off for the holidays. Despite angering a lot of thrall mates as a result of lacking experience I was able to complete the game with a certain group of people. Since I never really had the chance to do it using ingame VC: I want to thank everyone who (kind of) tolerated my presence and supported me on my way to 100 % despite my lack of gameplay experience. It must have been a pain for you but you guys were truly making my life less of a hell. :)
In short.
What I didn't like about the game
只有中国服务器, 你好 阿里!
What I liked about the game
This game is not about aliens.
The EN players are rather unsocial than impulsive.
The jingle at the end of each game doesn't exactly have a typical melody.
If you watch the sky at night you can see the game plays during a syzygy.
I can still hear the echoes of the screaming cannibals.
The bear is more aggressive than in real life.
The chef in this game is a true kushcook. (r)
The color of the animal and human blood in this game is Red9.
None of the characters looked like Lebron99 James (I'm out of ideas).
Uninformative/unnecessary stats
Lobbies I've been kicked out:
42
Angered and/or disappointed thrall mates:
13
Average heart rate while being a thrall knowing damn well I'm a disappointment:
158
Longest playing streak:
58 hours (small breaks in between)
Countries I'm banned in now:
12 (China is 11 of them)