The Hungry Lamb is a story about desperation and the sheer lengths people will go to when their lives are at stake. A tale of loss, a tale of fury, a tale of spiraling madness, and yet also one of love. The Hungry Lamb will take you to some dark places indeed, and with all this misery, could there truly be a light at the end of the tunnel?
To call the protagonist of this story a hero would be a lie without a doubt. His name is Liang, a deadly bandit who preys on the unlucky innocents who travel without protection throughout the backroads and woodlands of Ming Dynasty China. His partner Tongue, entices him into trafficking four children across the country for a dazzling amount of money. As Liang, you will be offered choices on this journey: choices that may save you or lead to your demise, and others that influence the lives of those around you. Pick wisely, lest you meet an untimely fate at the hands of the ones you least expect.
Right from the get-go, you’re drawn into the world with a selection of beautifully drawn backgrounds and well-designed characters. This a terrifying story because we know it’s based on reality, and as such it’s hard not to root for the characters. The only thing that separates us is time. A tranquil music score plays as we’re introduced to the children and their masters. It’s an often haunting melody, that echoes years of history and sadness, and as such, it begins to influence our decisions, making us feel for those who have no autonomy.
But those who lack autonomy, yet are forced to take decisions into their own hands, well those characters are all the more interesting. We’re treated to little flashbacks in the style of painted pieces, where we learn the truth about many characters. These scenes are constantly leading us towards something, something that is crucial to the story, yet we’re always pulled away. These flashbacks add a lot of great characterization while keeping the reader hooked. It’s hard not to be eager for more details.
The Hungry Lamb is full of twists and turns, dramatic events, and difficult decisions, yet there are a couple of problems that continue to plague the experience from start to finish. As a visual novel, arguably the most important thing is the writing. Yes, the music and characters may be great, yet without compelling prose, it’s a hard thing to sell.
From beginning to end, The Hungry Lamb is chock full of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, missed punctuation and endless line repetition. Add to this sloppy tense issues and you’ve really got a mess on your hands. While there was never anything that I outright couldn’t get the gist of, this kind of lack of attention to detail yanks you from the world and completely breaks any sense of immersion that had been building up.
Of course, this is a translation. I can understand a few mistakes slipping through the cracks, converting Chinese to English is never going to be simple, yet the translation here is pretty egregious. This should honestly be the priority for a visual novel, getting that text right is downright a requirement before releasing a game such as this. So many times I tried to get myself invested in the story, before getting pulled out by weird turns of phrase, or the protagonist talking like he was an angsty 13-year-old teenager. Some sentences read perfectly, with enchanting language that sings and sparks, and then some outright make zero sense. This leads me to think that the team may have used AI to translate this visual novel, leading to all the weird inconsistencies. If you’re going to release a game into multiple languages and have people pay to play it, at least hire a translation team to give it the justice it deserves. Because there’s real promise here, a touching story and characters that make the decisions oh so difficult.
It would be remiss of me to gloss over some of the weirdness here though. There are definitely a lot of strange writing choices in The Hungry Lamb. One could say it’s overly depressing or needlessly violent, though I’m not sure I agree. What I can’t get on board with is the needless pseudo-sexualization of an 11-year-old in the bathhouse scene. While it’s later revealed that Sui is actually 14, that doesn’t change anything at all. If you were to take out this scene, it would change absolutely nothing in the overall story. It adds no depth, very little extra characterization, and serves to make the player feel a bit weird about this whole thing. Yes, I understand it’s set 400 years ago and times were different then, but that feels like a particularly lame excuse to add something so unnecessary. The way Sui is drawn, the way she speaks, and the way the main character makes excuses to be with her, are contrived and cast an ominous cloud over the experience. And no that’s not a part of the story, but a conscious decision made by the creators. Scrap it, and The Hungry Lamb would be all the better for it.
Some things make me want to love this experience: the great addition of a flowchart and numerous savestates so a player can achieve all the endings without wasting time, the inclusion of real historical events, clothes and other little details that help flesh out the world. And yet others bring it down: the same repeated backgrounds being used over and over again, the poorly looping music during tense scenes and the stilted dialogue. In a lot of cases, most of this can be fixed with a bit of polish, but in others, there’s much work to be done.
As a visual novel, it’s serviceable at best. If you can ignore the poor translation, there’s a good story in there somewhere. I enjoyed the endings. Going through the whole game again wasn’t too much of a pain and there’s a relatively satisfying, not too depressing, conclusion. Unfortunately, The Hungry Lamb just makes too many slip-ups on the way. If you’re looking for a polished and thought-provoking piece, this lamb may just be a bit too overcooked.
