Ravenous Devils, we tried an original management software on cooking, tailoring and murder
Ravenous Devils
The most disparate ideas regularly emerge from the indie forges present on Steam, but, despite being used to seeing a bit of everything, the Ravenous Devils test has still left us rather amazed, for the strangeness of the underlying idea (albeit derived clearly by Sweeney Todd) and also for the contrast between the calm tones of the "entrepreneurial" management of Victorian shops and the brutal violence that goes on stage behind the scenes. This is because Percival and Hildred, the couple of protagonists of the game, are not really normal individuals: the first is a renowned tailor who makes clothes of considerable elegance, the second instead manages a sort of diner in the adjacent rooms, but that's what happens behind closed doors, or in the dark of the basement away from prying eyes, to characterize their peculiar lives more.They are in fact a couple of cold-blooded killers, who have found a very creative and ingenious way to make your business work better: recycle corpses using them as raw materials to cook delicious dishes to serve to the unsuspecting inhabitants of the neighborhood. | various procedures that ensure the proper functioning of the shops and maximum customer satisfaction. It is something rather impressive at first, but perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that, within a few minutes, you immediately enter the mechanism and find yourself putting corpses in a meat grinder with a naturalness worthy of the most experienced serial killer, but all done exquisitely in honor of the business and health of their store.
The shop of horrors
Ravenous Devils, a game scene that shows the various situations in progress in the shops The aim is to better manage Percival's tailoring and Hildred's diner, placed one on top of the other and connected by the bizarre secondary activity in which the couple has specialized. Being new to the neighborhood, as mysteriously fleeing from unspecified previous events, they must try to expand their clientele by increasing the business, expanding and enriching the shops but obviously trying to keep prying eyes away. The gameplay is all based on the management of the individual actions to be carried out in parallel by the two characters: the action takes place on different floors, staging a cross-section of the building where the shops are located. On the first floor is Percival's discreet tailoring, with the area open to the public where it is advisable to always keep new clothes in sight on the mannequins, while in the back room it is possible to take care of the creation of the clothes and kill the customers without being see (taking care to clean the floor immediately to avoid unedifying discoveries by the public).Downstairs is Hildred's diner, while in the basement there is space for the large kitchen / slaughterhouse, where the woman can devote herself to her exquisite recipes based on human flesh. A sort of hidden drain allows Percival to throw the corpses directly into the cellar below, where Hildred retrieves them to put them in the meat grinder or other tools that will then be introduced into the game. With a few mouse gestures it is possible to quickly switch from one floor to another, in order to manage the two shopkeepers / killers quickly and practically simultaneously, in order to fill the time with the most effective actions and in the correct sequence. , because it is essential to quickly satisfy customer requests and obviously erase the traces of misdeeds.
Activities in continuous growth
In Ravenous Devils there are many recipes that can be carried out, but they are unlocked progressively The trial version of Ravenous Devils allowed to try only a poor first hour of play, thus precluding a lot of content that will be added later. Every single section of the game is in fact subject to evolution and expansion, as befits a business that must grow: each floor of the building can be expanded and enriched with tools and objects to expand the possibilities of commerce, or it is possible to invest in improvement. equipment to speed up individual processes or in the addition of new recipes to be proposed in the diner. There are also entire floors to be unlocked later and filled with further activities, to make the action even more complex and multifaceted, which in the first part tested actually tends to be a bit repetitive, always focusing on the same activities.The basic gameplay mechanism requires you to use Percival to lure customers into the workshop at the back of the tailor's shop, kill them, steal their clothes and throw the corpses down the drain, and then clean the floor to erase the traces. From the stolen clothes it is possible to obtain fabrics to create new clothes to be put on sale in the atelier placed in the window, while the corpses are recovered by Hildred and recycled as meat to compose various recipes and propose them to the customers of the diner.
Ravenous Devils, a scene in which one of the many murders in the tailor's shop takes place This gameplay loop is further complicated when the pace and quantity of customers increases, who must be satisfied quickly to avoid losing them. while the opening of new plans and the expansion of activities opens the door to further actions to be carried out, always with a certain coordination in the couple, but all this will only be seen in the full version. The actual variety of game situations is therefore all to be evaluated, because what has been tried only allows you to get carried away with the basic mechanisms by essentially repeating the same actions over and over.
A particular atmosphere
The nineteenth-century London in which Ravenous Devils takes place appears at times, outside the main building As we have said, there is no doubt that the main source of inspiration for the Italian team Bad Vices Games is precisely Sweeney Todd: the London setting Nineteenth-century in full Penny Dreadful style and also the subject are in fact fully drawn from the bizarre story of the evil barber of Fleet Street, including the idea of transforming the heinous murders into a culinary business. It is a fascinating base and the developers have managed to translate it in an optimal way into a video game, also thanks to the particular framing adopted that allows you to keep everything more or less under control and above all quickly switch from one character to another and between the different floors. of the building in a few clicks of the mouse. The graphics are quite simple, as befits the genre and type of production, but still manages to create the right atmosphere, trusting that the various glitches currently present can be solved in time, perhaps with an enrichment and greater variation of the models and of animations.A mention should also be made for the story of Ravenous Devils: the game introduces us to the couple of protagonists intent on starting the business after moving to the new neighborhood in a hurry, making it clear that they have a very stormy past, as one might expect from two killers of this kind. The first few minutes of the game offer a glimpse into what might happen later when the two receive a mysterious anonymous letter from someone who knows their past. We can therefore expect some interesting developments also on the narrative front, waiting to find out more.
A fast-paced simulation / management based on "micro-management", with short continuous actions to be carried out in sequence, succeeds often to trigger the right addiction mechanisms in players and Ravenous Devils falls into this category. Although still very limited in terms of choices and possibilities for action and expansion, the game demo immediately captures its mechanisms thanks to the rather particular characterization and setting. The gameplay of the first few minutes is inevitably monotonous, still relying on a small core of what the full game should be, but that was enough to make us wait for the full version with some interest, hoping that it will significantly expand the gameplay mechanics. .
