The Hungry Fly

I keep coming back to the image: a fly with teeth, starving in a swamp where nothing will cooperate and die. That premise alone tells you whether The Hungry Fly is for you, and if your reaction was curiosity rather than revulsion, you should probably just stop reading and go play it. Erupting Avocado, a two-person studio out of Sherbrooke, Quebec, built this as a first-person psychological horror adventure with the visual grammar of a PSX-era fever dream. The lo-fi geometry and rough lighting are intentional, not a limitation. They give the swamp a kind of warped storybook quality, something between a children's picture book and a nightmare your brain manufactured at age seven. You crawl on walls, take flight, scrub yourself clean after eating, and at one critical juncture you feed on memories inside a carnivorous plant to slowly unmake its interior. The controls require some patience during the flying sections and occasional multi-character moments, but there are no enemies, no timers, and no fail states. The pacing is unhurried by design, and the game auto-saves at each chapter break so you can move through it in small pieces if the weight gets heavy. And it does get heavy. The Hungry Fly uses its grotesque swamp menagerie, a yo-yo caterpillar, a spider too weak to catch prey, creatures stranded in a kind of deathless limbo, as metaphor for mental illness, disability, and mourning. The narration runs in third-person prose that reads like a fairy tale, but the content is for adults who understand content warnings around self-harm and gore. The choices you make while interacting with the swamp's inhabitants steer the story toward one of three endings, each of which reportedly lands its gut-punch differently. The developer has said the surreal narrative is left deliberately open so players bring their own meaning to it. That is either exactly what you want from a short horror game or the thing that will frustrate you most. Know yourself. The community reception tells a clear story: overwhelmingly positive from a small but genuine audience of players who appreciate weird, handcrafted horror that treats its themes with care. The comparisons that keep surfacing from players and critics are apt ones: What Remains of Edith Finch and How Fish Is Made are in the same atmospheric family. This is spiritual territory, not mechanical challenge. If you came for jump scares or combat loops, look elsewhere. If you came for something that sits in your chest for a few days after you finish it, The Hungry Fly earns its short runtime completely. One honest caveat: the runtime is genuinely short, somewhere in the ninety-minute to three-hour range depending on how many endings you chase. For some that will feel like exactly enough. For others it will sting. The studio's previous title, The Repairing Mantis, shares the same visual DNA and sensibility, so if you have history with that one this is clearly the next step.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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