While there are loads of indie games out there that take daring risks to deliver experiences that feel fresh and distinctive, there is absolutely a fair amount of risk in doing so. Novel controls and gameplay have the potential to help set you apart, but if they don’t come together they will sink you. In the case of Hungry Meem, you can see the potential in its oddball setup, with you somewhat indirectly trying to get your hungry little characters to explore and collect resources while your ability to direct them is limited. Unfortunately, despite the seemingly endless supply of pop-up prompts trying to explain what’s going on and give you guidance, it struggles to come together and honestly the rewards for your success are too slow coming and provide too little payoff.

After a pretty lengthy introductory story involving a gluttonous society that essentially almost ate itself out of existence, and was then saved by mere chance, you’ll have the opportunity to walk through a similarly long introduction to the game’s mechanics. Going into a zone, you’ll try to work with some number of Meem minions, moving a bag used to collect ingredients around to help roughly guide them. Of course, since they’re pretty gluttonous little critters, as established in the opening, you can only expect to return with so much since they’re prone to eating a fair number of the things they’ll pick up. With the spoils you return with you’ll have options to craft snacks, meals, or feasts depending on how much you have and where you are in the overall game, with most of these things merely helping to maintain the status quo or gain more Memes so that you can continue to expand and make your tasks marginally easier.

Of course, there’s also some degree of city building to it, the ability to have your Meems mate and produce offspring, and some other features, but honestly they get buried by the grind of going out with your unreliable helpers to collect resources, which really just isn’t terribly interesting or fun once you’ve done it a few times. Unforced errors like some honestly terrible sound effects that go off with some regularity make it sound like you're presiding over a clown show, which also helps to dampen any enthusiasm you could try to build up. The shame here is that you can see ambition in the overall design, but honestly none of that ends up mattering since the core experience just doesn’t work very well. Even with far too many text prompts trying to help, it was often quite difficult to understand what you were supposed to be doing or how, relying on trial and error with some regularity, but then also making the in-game help feel pointless when it is so ineffective. 

Consider that I even restarted the game fresh, just to be sure that at the time I was playing it the first time I hadn’t lost my mind somehow. Yet even when I knew what to do, the second time through I was still baffled by some of the instructions and how they were intended to be helpful. With those issues in mind it’s a struggle to find a silver lining. With pretty well every aspect of the game’s design having some flaw, I can see potential players deciding to check out for multiple reasons. Whether it’s the overall presentation, the repetitive and aggravating gameplay loop, or just being bewildered by it all and wondering when it will begin to be fun… this is a title that’s very difficult to recommend.