If Feed the Pit were simply a quickfire extraction game about hunting down obscenely wealthy people and chucking them into a ravenous Sarlacc, that'd have been plenty catharsis enough for this age of actual trillionaires. It'd have been solid reaction video fodder for terminally online Marxists, a kind of Hunt: Showdown for the dirtbag left. But Feed the Pit goes further. It's a creepy narrative experience that, after an hour with the game's first act, reminds me a little of Mouthwashing.
It's got a found family of masked cultists who initially scare the pants off you, with their lipless canine grins, and then slowly charm you. One of the cultists owns a Nintendo DS, or offbrand equivalent. Another really likes rock music, but is cool with you saying that you despise it. They all gather beneath the portrait of a messianic bald man who looks worryingly like Jeff Bezos, though there is nothing Bezosian about the group's desire to hurl well-heeled fugitives into a rippling tectonic maw.
You are a new recruit, the Seeker, whose job is to venture into the wilds and gut the aforesaid moneybaggers, hauling them back to the church. Along the way, you'll investigate the cult's background and perhaps, unearth a few secrets. The "Pit" itself flowers from the wall of a scarlet cavern that resembles an intestine, weirdly studded with furniture. It communicates by way of a big blue telephone. The creature's first words will, I promise, surprise you.
As will the things in the woods. Each kill mission in the game's first act sees you roving around a forested hillside with a paper grid map and a torch. To flush out the resident silver spooner, you must narrow that grid down to exactly one square. To do said narrowing, you must acquire Tarot-style cards emblazoned with blocky pictures of fish, pyramids, medicine pills, and other occult pop memorabilia. These cards are presented to you by a peculiar headless man, smoke billowing from his collar, who teleports around the map.
Each card picture covers a certain amount of map squares, with your character at the centre. When you incinerate the card, you'll learn whether that area harbours your quarry. As you burn cards, day fades into night. Once you've discovered the target square, you'll poke around for footprints and follow an escalating heartbeat, striving to slay the lurking Gatsby before they get the drop on you.
It turns purging plutocrats into a summoning ritual. Wealth casts a spell on society, rendering the owner untouchable; Feed the Pit deploys corresponding supernatural means to reduce the upper crust to their eminently stabbable flesh.
Some will find the arcane detectivework cumbersome, I'm sure, but having to keep hurrying across the map in search of the Cardmaster serves the game's horror, because the woods aren't safe for you either. High net worth individuals aside, the trees are home to artfully glitchy, low-poly abominations that remind me of Lethal Company's menagerie. All of these creatures have different ways of hiding. All of them are harder to spot, once darkness falls.
This is just the game's first act, which apparently spans three or four hours. The other two acts will launch as free updates in the coming months. If you like horror, I reckon you should take the plunge. Going by the title and cardgame element, I had this pegged as one of those cheerfully demeaning roguelite affairs where you're trapped in a mechanistic metaphor for predatory capitalism, but it's got unique texture and importantly, an engrossing story. Cool card designs, too.