Hungry Meem is part real-time strategy, part simulation and tasks you with feeding little monsters called “Meems” and slowly expanding their village and holding feast events to grow the World Tree at the center of their home. Through the use of an on-screen cursor, you select areas, activities, and Meems in order to gather materials, construct buildings, and feed these odd-looking creatures. The in-game tutorials aren’t quite as effective as they could be, and so it’s not a bad idea to lower the difficulty level early on before you fully get your bearings.

The World Tree functions like a dungeon that houses the materials you need to scavenge in order for the Meems to survive and thrive. By picking up and moving a storage bag, you can guide your Meems to forage for sticks, food, vines, and other items. Your first challenge is to use the giant cooking pot in the village to craft snacks so that your Meems don’t lose their nerve while scouring the World Tree. It turns out that cookies and other snacks you’ll eventually be able to produce are vital for your success; when a Meem’s mental health reaches zero, they bug out and will start dumping the goods you’ve acquired from your bag and generally ignore everything they’re supposed to be doing. Of the three parameters you need to monitor–hunger, physical health, and mental health–the latter seems to be the most vital, at least early on when you have fewer mechanisms to raise it up.

When you return from a successful dungeon crawl, your hard-earned gains are thrown in a general storage area for you to use on cooking, building production, or individual Meem requests. One of the main ways that you make progress in Hungry Meem is by completing the tasks assigned to you by an omniscient statue named Tohren. After you’ve gone through a dozen or so such quests, you’re invited to throw a feast for the village, and this increases the level of the World Tree, which in turn opens up new areas of the dungeon for you to explore. Along the way, you’ll have the opportunity to grow your village’s population by having two Meems mate with each other to produce an egg that you can incubate and even assign specific learned skills from the parents to the offspring.

The overworld map also grows as you collect specific construction materials from Tohren quests and inside the World Tree, so the exterior and interior both gradually expand over time. That said, the gameplay loop doesn’t seem to change a whole lot, and the challenge is more focused on acquiring the materials you need to throw the next feast and keeping your Meems hale, hearty, and sound of mind. In terms of visuals, the presentation and menus are fairly lackluster, which makes the grind a little less palatable. The sound effects range from bizarre to unpleasant, and so most of the aesthetic part of the experience lands on a sour note.

Hungry Meem reminds me a little bit of Pikmin except clumsier. The zoomed-in dungeon perspective makes it difficult to position the storage bag so that the Meems will act how you want, but even then they can struggle in a multitude of ways, like eating the foods you want to bring back because they’re hungry little Meems. Much like raising toddlers and kids who seemingly have bottomless stomachs and insatiable desire for snacks, so too do the Meems that you rely on to progress forward in the game. This means that you are constantly juggling enjoyable but fleeting moments and frustrating considerations, and the end result is one that’s hard to recommend. It’s a little fun once you figure out how to get what you want from it, but Hungry Meem takes a bit more than it gives, and ultimately it serves up a feast that filled me up after just a few courses.