The Hungry Lamb is a visual novel depicting a story of tragedy and desperation; of fighting one’s fate, and challenging the impossible. Read our spoilerless review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Disclaimer: The following game, and subsequently this review, contains depictions of realistic gore, derogatory language, criminal behavior, death, corpses, partial nudity, bloody scenes, and depictions of sexual violence. If you find the aforementioned themes triggering, please continue with your own discretion, or feel free to check out our other reviews instead.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Review Overview
What is The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty?
Liang is a bandit familiar with murder, theft, blackmail, and arson. However, unlike many greedy bandits, he has managed to retain a set of principles resembling that of the general populace. One of these is a distaste for human trafficking, especially given the troublesome nature of the job. But then, one day, he was tasked to transport a handful of children to a noble in a faraway city — and one of them knew more than she needed to. With repulsive secrets lying underneath his already problematic job, will he end up keeping his end of the bargain?
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty features:
⚫︎ An outstanding cast of characters
⚫︎ Striking, thought-provoking themes
⚫︎ Beautiful artwork
⚫︎ A linear but excellent story
⚫︎ Great voice acting
⚫︎ Well-placed humor to balance its themes
 Steam |
$9.99 |
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Superb Writing Strong Use of Audio Striking Themes Great Cast |
You May Get Lost (Figuratively) Themes May Be Disagreeable |
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Overall Score - 94/100
The Hungry Lamb is an excellent visual novel that approaches sensitive themes with a gripping side story of the lower caste. It combines beautiful visuals, immaculate audio work, impeccable writing, and the possibility of a life-changing conclusion to make you continue clicking through its dialogue. And it does the job much better than anybody could ask it to.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Story - 10/10
Its plot is rich with intrigue, drama, and dire themes delivered by its colorful cast of characters and well-balanced dialogue. Everything proceeds at a pace that feels natural, without many details shoehorned to provide context. But despite its dark, gritty theme, it still manages to provide a lot of icebreakers to mellow your nerves at appropriate moments.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Gameplay - 8/10
As a visual novel, most of The Hungry Lamb’s gameplay only involves clicking through dialogue and making choices when presented with one. The game does offer quite a lot of missable events, and there’s even an affinity system that dictates whether you are able to witness certain scenes. That gives every choice a lot of weight to it, as you may have to start from a point way back just to gain access.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Visuals - 10/10
This game certainly doesn’t hold back with its visuals. While I can go on and on about how well-drawn each and every character and background is, it’s nothing compared to how overwhelming its depictions of societal degeneration can be. Do note that the game has a lot of blood to offer, both figuratively and literally. But, in a lot of ways, that’s actually deserving of praise.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Audio - 9/10
The game employs a lot of tricks with sounds to manipulate your mood while reading the story. Its effects on your experience cannot be overstated, as it’s practically what makes the magic happen in certain situations. The voice work is also nothing short of extraordinary, with practically every character managing to create a real-life counterpart through your screen just with their performances alone. For some reason, though, the main protagonist himself isn’t voiced.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Value for Money - 10/10
For such an excellent visual novel with around and over fifteen hours of reading time to be sold at a cent less than $10 is almost a crime. This rings true despite its mostly linear nature, as there are a variety of scenes to unlock that a blind playthrough could easily miss. But aside from the monetary value of your time, the biggest return on your investment comes from the experience of reading this gem in the first place.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Review: Gripping Excellence
While I consider (just consider) myself relatively well-informed about upcoming visual novels, I was honestly not aware that ZeroCreationGame had released another one a couple of months ago. I read their previous work, Lay a Beauty to Rest and its DLC over a year ago (though technically, they did have another game after that called Black & White. However, it’s not available in English last time I checked with just my eyes), and it remains one of my favorite visual novels that have been released within the last five years. It’s an extremely intriguing and heart-wrenching tale told with a great pace and just the right amount of embellishment. Oh, and the artwork was excellent, too (Hua fans rise up).
Anyway, I finally noticed it over the weekend and decided to get a copy. Surprisingly, the game was priced at a value that was slightly cheaper than Lay a Beauty to Rest. I immediately thought, "does this mean there’s less to see here?" Now that I’ve actually finished the story, I can safely say that I was right.
And wrong at the same time.
Sure, The Hungry Lamb has a far shorter run time than its older sister. However, its contents are dense and effective. It’s great at delivering an experience that’s memorable at every single turn.
So, what’s The Hungry Lamb’s setting? It’s basically the story of a bandit and a slave’s journey. It starts out with Liang, the bandit and protagonist, simply trying to fulfill the delivery while avoiding as much trouble as he can. After all, human trafficking is bad. However, Man Sui (Sui’er from this point on), one of the slaves Liang is handling and the main heroine of the story, is more than just a simple child.
She is far more mature and understanding of the world than her age implies.
Many of the characters share this trait to an extent. No, that doesn’t mean they’re all wolves in sheep’s clothing, which is an apt metaphor since Liang has a habit of viewing the people around him as animals. Even more appropriately, he sees people like himself as wolves and many others as just lambs. Curiously, though, he sees Sui’er as a cat instead.
For example, Tongue, Liang’s colleague and partner, started off as an irritable, greedy scum. But a bit later on in the story, he shows a modicum of compassion toward the slaves when he realizes where they are destined to be.
Realistically, most people don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. Some have a different personality when they’re alone or with people they trust compared to when they’re with strangers. This very human nature manifests very strongly in certain characters in the game, lending even more realism to the narrative.
Sometimes, that nature is forcibly dragged out, though. Perhaps the most entertaining scenes in the game, in my opinion, involve Sui’er leading Liang into troublesome (particularly for him) situations that don’t fit his identity as a gnarly and cold-blooded bandit. This leads to some particularly engaging content, such as Liang later realizing what had just happened and punishing Sui’er with some eyebrow-raising means.
But all those aren’t just filler. It serves as a great collection of scenes to catapult both Liang and Sui’er’s character development. This eventually leads to the other slaves coming to rely on the former as a sort of guardian while increasing both Liang and Sui’er’s trust in each other. These scenes are vital for quite literally everything else that follows as they develop a relationship beyond that of mere bandit and commodity.
Honestly, though, I think the increase in both trust and respect for each other isn’t the best thing about it. What really gets me is the breaking down of barriers between them. The narrative delivers the progress in a way that’s extremely endearing, especially if one considers how extremely thorny their first real interaction with each other went.
The entire experience is quite a rollercoaster. It does have some predictability to it, but it doesn’t hurt the narrative at all. Instead, the way each character develops themselves and cements their place in the narrative makes getting a prediction right more satisfying than anything else. The opposite is even more gratifying, as there are some mysteries presented relatively early on, but they are held off from reaching a conclusion until much later. This delay acts as a sort of constant pulling force for your nerves, haunting you with the idea that things are never fine until the end.
So, is The Hungry Lamb a good visual novel? Yes, yes, it is. While, sure, it does have a lot of themes that may be disturbing to a lot of people. But beyond that is a story that should be told. Quite frankly, this is an amazing visual novel for anybody to read, regardless of their exposure to the genre.
Pros of The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty
| Things The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Got Right |
|---|
|
Superb Writing Strong Use of Audio Striking Themes Great Cast |
Superb Writing
There are generally three types of ways dialogue is written, particularly in visual novels. They can be written with excessive embellishment, which often sacrifices the pace in order for the writer to flex their vocabulary and poetic skills. On the other hand, it can be written with barely any flowery language, allowing the story to proceed at a breakneck pace by cutting off any and all excess words.
The Hungry Lamb fits more into the third category, though. It strikes a great balance between decorative prose and conciseness, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the story’s world while keeping the story moving. It even provides you with difficult choices at times, almost as if the game is testing your morality.
In doing so, it gives itself a wide berth to introduce character-building fillers naturally, such as the nightly shadow play lessons Liang eventually takes from Sui’er and the occasional flashbacks of their earlier years. These are delivered gradually, allowing the readers to acclimate to the slowly changing relationship between Liang and the children he’s trafficking.
At the same time, the writers didn’t fail to provide a bit of fanservice to the readers by using subtle writing tricks. This is particularly true for the protagonist’s relatively vague position in the hierarchy of bandits early on, as it tickles even the slightest sense of power fantasists in its readers.
There’s also a ton of world-building. But instead of being done in long sections of the characters explaining things to an invisible third party, it’s instead pulled off while the story develops. It uses events that directly show the state of the world around them, such as the deserting soldiers they meet and the abandoned village that has started to rely on cannibalism to stave off the famine.
The Hungry Lamb’s setting is held in truly dark times. It’s impossible to not feel constant consternation about the characters and the future they face. However, the writers have also made sure to add some tasteful humor at very natural points in the story to break the ice every so often. I found it very welcoming every time they did so, as it allowed me to digest the story with a semi-fresh perspective at almost every turn.
Strong Use of Audio
Impressively, almost every single dialogue in The Hungry Lamb is voiced. It’s not just any voice acting, either. The work done in this game, from Sui’er’s mischievous but easily subdued nature to Tongue’s sleazy yet relatively considerate character, is easily delivered through both prose and voice. This is especially true during more charged exchanges, as they are able to deliver the characters’ emotions (and even their age) clearly through their performances.
The effectiveness of the voice acting is compounded by the great use of sound effects and BGMs. While most of the story proceeds with a relatively relaxed set of tunes in the background (until all the big scenes come up), the game also employs silence very well. In those cases, the game relies on natural sounds to take the readers into the scene, such as the sound of the campfire’s crackling and footsteps echoing.
Very specific events also employ notes that resound at certain frequencies to manipulate the reader’s emotions. This is often heard in major scenes but is much more noticeable when big truth bombs are revealed alongside a high-pitched sound. It’s incredibly immersive, effectively putting you in Liang’s shoes at those moments in time.
Striking Themes
The Hungry Lamb depicts the widespread drought and accompanying famine that spread in its portrayal of the late Ming Dynasty. All the common and predictable consequences of this calamity are displayed in its full glory.
Writing that concerns these topics should be embraced, as they show a side of humanity that’s normally inaccessible to those who live their everyday lives normally. And certainly, the game doesn’t pull any punches. There are tons of scenes that show humanity at its worst, such as resorting to murder and theft to obtain food, the sale of women and children as slaves and prostitutes, and even cannibalism.
However, the theme is not only striking for the readers. It’s also the same for the characters themselves, as they are prominently depicted to have been severely affected by the collapse of society around them. Sui’er, for example, has matured too fast due to her experiences, which inevitably left a lot of childishness in her personality.
This adds an incredible amount of realism, as the characters you spend the novel’s entire length with are direct products of the world’s cruelty.
Great Cast
Creating a well-rounded character isn’t as easy as picking up a template from the internet and filling it up. From a narrative perspective, each character must be fleshed out using prose instead of a set of bullet points.
Humanity itself is something especially hard to depict. But the cast, especially the main characters, are as human as they come. Within just a few scenes, the game easily provides them with a backstory and personality, turning them from a collection of pixels on your screen arranged to resemble something bipedal, to living, breathing human beings. It even provides context on why they act the way they do in a way that doesn’t feel like it was shoehorned into the dialogue.
None of them overlap with another character’s role, either. They each have a unique role to play, even just considering their dispositions. This gives every scenario a lot of color despite the bleak world in which the game is set.
Cons of The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty
| Things That The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Can Improve |
|---|
|
You May Get Lost (Figuratively) Themes May Be Disagreeable |
You May Get Lost (Figuratively)
The game’s pursuit of delivering dialogue natural to the characters does come at a cost. As someone not very familiar with Chinese history (or even geography), there were some moments where filler conversations between characters left me lost. This is because, as appropriate of characters that live in the present… of that past… you get what I mean, they would sometimes talk about the local happenings of that era.
Of course, most of the time, you'll have no idea what they're talking about.
Now, most of them might just be gibberish unique to that world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t complain, even if those conversations are never really relevant to the main story.
Themes May Be Disagreeable
While watching humanity degenerate is a thought-provoking experience, some people may not be able to stomach the themes that accompany its narrative. This is particularly true for its excessive references to cannibalism, which is depicted quite explicitly in its prose and visuals. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t support a censorship toggle in its settings, so you’ll have no choice but to prepare your stomach if you’re particularly eager to read it.
It’s worth the perseverance, though.
Is The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Worth It?
Spend money on it now.
There’s really no doubt about it in my mind that regardless of whether you’re looking for a visual novel to read as a "veteran" or first-time reader, The Hungry Lamb should be up there in your list of things to get. It has excellent writing, an amazing cast of characters, great voice work, and an awesome story.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$9.99 |
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty FAQ
Does The Hungry Lamb have images of gore?
There’s quite a lot of gore imagery, relatively speaking. Viewer discretion is advised, but it shouldn’t detract from the overall experience.
Will The Hungry Lamb have a sequel or a DLC?
While Lay a Beauty to Rest had a DLC, it’s unknown if The Hungry Lamb will also get one as of now.
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The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty Product Information
 |
|
| Title | THE HUNGRY LAMB: TRAVELING IN THE LATE MING DYNASTY |
|---|---|
| Release Date | April 22, 2024 |
| Developer | 零创游戏 |
| Publisher | 零创游戏, 2P Games |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Visual Novel, Drama |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | Not Rated (Assumed Mature) |
| Official Website | N/A |
