Don't Let It Starve Review
Don't Let It Starve traps you in a filthy kitchen, arranging bento boxes for a monster that may eat you next in a clever spin on the CloverPit formula.
Don't Let It Starve. Credit: Eduardo Scarpato / Black Lantern Collective
Panik Arcade's CloverPit created horror and absurd comedy from doing a seemingly mundane activity under the pressure of a Saw-like trap scenario. Don't Let It Starve from solo dev Eduardo Scarpato follows a similar path, replacing slot machines and money with bento boxes and calories while giving players a greater feeling of agency. By shifting success away from random chance and toward spatial planning, every mistake feels like my own.
You're trapped in a grim underground kitchen where a grotesque creature styling itself as a chef hides inside the walls, demanding increasingly filling meals. Every completed bento buys another chance at survival while the monster promises freedom if you can somehow satisfy its impossible appetite. Fail to satiate it, and you become its next meal. Like CloverPit, the sheer absurdity makes the horror more unsettling.
Cooking works like a Resident Evil-style inventory puzzle. Every round asks you to rotate an assortment of oddly shaped ingredients into a limited number of bento box tray grids while chasing recipes, adjacency bonuses, and multipliers. Like in CloverPit, you can spend your earnings on strange tools that modify your bonuses or boost your odds, letting you tailor a strategy. Random ingredients still force you to improvise, but I almost always felt like I had meaningful decisions to make. I wasn't just hoping for better luck. I was deciding which ingredients to keep, where to place them, and whether sacrificing future flexibility was worth a massive score now. That agency makes all the difference. CloverPit often left me feeling infuriated with slot machine losses that felt totally arbitrary, though that’s arguably the intent of a game that’s explicitly a cautionary tale about gambling. Though there’s still a degree of RNG here, failed runs usually came from getting greedy or painting myself into a corner.
Don't Let It Starve. Credit: Eduardo Scarpato / Black Lantern Collective
Don't Let It Starve. Credit: Eduardo Scarpato / Black Lantern Collective
If you're desperate enough, you can shove your own arms into the meat grinder to increase a bento's value. Once both arms are gone, your cursor becomes a mouth instead. It's a wonderfully morbid detail that perfectly captures the game's warped sense of humor. Environmental storytelling also rewards curiosity. Finding a flashlight that reveals messages left behind by previous victims gives the underground kitchen far more personality than the premise alone. That gradual sense of discovery kept me willingly feeding my own arms into the grinder.
Like CloverPit, the chunky low-poly graphics walk a fine line between creepy and goofy. The exaggerated models never completely abandon their PS1-era charm, yet the harsh lighting, filthy kitchen, and oppressive sound design still create genuine tension.
Black Lantern Collective is quietly becoming one of my favorite indie horror publishers. Don't Let It Starve continues their impressive streak of inventive horror games. Though this is clearly inspired by CloverPit, it does enough to stand on its own through clever spins on the established mechanics, often improving on the formula.
Don't Let It Starve
Don't Let It Starve borrows heavily from CloverPit, then improves the formula by making bad decisions hurt more than bad luck.
