Published , by Lucas White
Published , by Lucas White
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty is a visual novel set in the mid-1600s. China was in awful shape at this time; natural disasters, plague, economic issues, and a government failing to address it all led to famine and violence. The story is a stark and brutal exploration of what these conditions can do to people in different walks of life, with a particular focus on the fragile relationship between adults and children.
Protagonist Liang is not a good person. As he sees it he’s a “wolf” among “sheep,” a bandit who survives in this world by killing, robbing, and taking on other odd jobs with his partner “Tongue.” The latest job is one that challenges Liang’s boundaries: a group of “lambs,” children, are to be transported by foot to a distant city, where they’ll be sold to be, best case scenario, maids or servants. The group includes a pair of sisters from a poor family that sold them, a kidnapped girl whose noble family didn’t pay ransom, and a mysterious, mute girl with no known surviving family, all seemingly under the age of ten. Regardless of Tongue’s attempts to justify the job to Liang, and his own internal rationalizations, this is human trafficking.
If the prospect of being a human trafficker as the player is a dealbreaker, I don’t blame you. Hungry Lamb is a challenging, unapologetic story and it doesn’t shy away from alluding to what the other possible outcomes are. And that isn’t the only window into darkness you’re forced to look into. During this time people were left on their own, with no support systems as the “Little Ice Age” prevented rainfall for multiple years, destroying agriculture. From individual starving farm families to whole villages worn down by dwindling resources, aggressive taxes and desperate armies, cannibalism was as much of a threat in some areas as bandits.
Hungry Lamb’s use of children is no mistake; children are weak and rely on adults, who are only as reliable as their moral frameworks and fortitude against stress. They’re also like mirrors in a way, and that’s something this story leans on heavily. Once again, jumping into Hungry Lamb means being confronted with some uncomfortable material that requires a content warning, but it does so as a work of historical fiction.
Both tragic backstories and present scenarios Liang and his group encounter along their travels infuse Hungry Lamb with a strong bleakness. But despite its difficult subject matter, the story never revels in its depravity for shock value, nor does it go into explicit detail to prove its points. There’s a careful balance between restraint and clinical indifference struck in how things like gore and sexual violence are depicted or alluded to, and a focus on the characters’ experiences and perspectives that maintain a sense of humanity through the hardship. Hungry Lamb is neither schlock nor exploitation, and finds ways to show how people still find ways to be happy in dire circumstances.
One such way is through food. Hunger is the obvious thematic focus here, and when anyone is able to eat something more than rice porridge or travel rations, that’s when Hungry Lamb chooses to wallow in excess, almost like an epic meal in Monster Hunter. The emotional impact of having good food when simply surviving a hike is a privilege is deeply felt in the text and imagery, but equally so is the felt sense of chaos in the body when hunger takes a desperate turn. Food is everything, literally, especially when it’s taken away. Seeing the joy in a simple meal has a profound effect, one that easily induces self-reflection.
As challenging and serious as it is, Hungry Lamb does seek out the “fun” in visual novels, with multiple story routes and endings, even Bad Endings in the tradition of horrible death scenes written in the first person. There’s a nice, simple Flowchart feature that lets you jump to branching scenes, letting you skip around to find the different routes without having to restart the story every time. Other tools such as logs, instant saving, auto play and more are easily accessible with a small, unobtrusive menu, and the touch screen in handheld mode is fully utilized as well. The video game stuff is all well and good here. Weird to go over after a bunch of reflecting on starving to death and child suffering, but hey.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty is a fascinating, challenging, and compelling story that uses its form as a visual novel to tell a story about normal, flawed, and vulnerable people. These people are dealt horrible hands outside of their control, and through a historical lens, we as the audience are shown choices that believably could have been made in real life during the depicted period. It can be ugly, but it can also be full of life, with tragedy and violence punctuated by characters bonding over shadow puppets or a meal. There’s a darkness to this story that could justifiably turn people away, but I never got a sense of titillation or glee on the creative side, but rather an interest in showing the reader a difficult piece of human history. The prose can be a bit dry at times on top of that, but otherwise in a space that’s full of anime-style fantasy and action, it was refreshing to find something more grounded in reality.
The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty is available on March 13, 2025 for the Nintendo Switch, and now for PC. A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher for this review.