'Eat: The Revolution' Game Has You Chomp Your Way to Joining the Resistance
Food-themed apps are often mindless, but subtly rewarding mobile games that feed our need to keep busy. In a similar manner, mewly-released mobile game Eat: The Revolution encourages players to tap away at food while pledging their allegiance to an unknown resistance. This latest game from Crows Crows Crows, a new-ish experimental video game studio, is, however, anything but mindless. In fact, there are times you may feel like it’s playing with your mind.
The premise of the game is simple: when you see food images appear, tap to chomp them out of existence. Set against a black background with Instagram-like captions and Hannibal-esque eating noises, you can make your way through this wonky experience at your own pace. Once you start, you’ll find yourself strangely committed to making it to the end of the game. That’s because the longer you play, the more interesting—and dubious—the messages and pictures get. Early on you’ll see images of fruit in a basket, cupcakes, and a carton of eggs. Eventually, that will start to include other foods like hamburgers, rice, and French fries before turning into less savory items like raw meat, pills on leaves, and a somewhat unnerving apple in grayscale.
Meanwhile, the messages turn basic sayings into paranoid declarations of allegiance to some front against an ominous Uncle Hunger. Messages of encouragement (“Eat” and “The food is tasty ... if only there was more ...”) slowly become things like “Eat will deliver you,” “All food is fake” and “Distrust scraps.” Several even warn of the rage of Uncle Hunger and his necessary defeat.
“Companies like Deliveroo and Foodora have been working together with the notorious scumbag Unclie Hunger since the beginning of the Food Chain,” William Pugh, the game’s lead designer, told Polygon. “It has always been that those who wield the means of production hold the power—but with the release of Eat and its ability to generate infinite food we are passing the power back to the hands of the people.”
If you visit the app’s website, you’ll find a mysterious message about “the ultimate disruption of the hierarchical power structure at the heart of society” where Eat is working “outside the broken system of NASTY NASTY CAPITALISM.” The game’s concept is a bit surreal, to say the least, but a marketing email may imply it’s all a tie-in effort for another soon to be announced Crows Crows Crows game.
Regardless of its ultimate purpose, you can download the app for Android and iOS devices for free now to see what you can unwrap about this food mystery.