Flaming Fried Nutrition: Daydream Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Skip
A cute horror pet-raising idler about a girl who loves hamburgers. Forty-five minutes in I did not know what I was doing
Flaming Fried Nutrition: Daydream pitches itself as a Cute Horror pet-raising game with Idler elements. You fall asleep, wake up next to a hamburger, pet it, feed it, ride it, and dream of perfect happiness. The developer sent this one over for a look. I would not have picked it up on my own, and nothing on the store page grabbed me. I gave it around forty-five minutes anyway, half of that with the game running next to me while I waited for hearts to fill.
My verdict is a Skip. Maybe some people love this exact brand of weird, and if you are already the audience you will know it. I do not think anyone stumbles onto it cold and finds it for them. Forty-five minutes in I never found a goal, the hearts had barely moved, and I still could not explain what the game wants.
Cons
- The heart counter climbs so slowly that a chunk of the session is leaving the game running, with no clear way to speed it or earn more
- Pets, furniture, dancing, and the golden burger all unlock or appear without an obvious benefit or goal attached
- No sign inside forty-five minutes of what the game wants you to do, or who it is aimed at
The daydream framing
You start as a girl falling asleep in what looks like a grotty house, gun on the floor, baseball bat with nails sticking through it next to you. Then you wake up in a clean house with a hamburger beside you.
The pitch calls the whole thing a daydream. If you read it that way, the grotty house is real life and the hamburger world is what she would rather be dreaming of. I would be inferring a lot to say that is what the game means by it.
The Cute art you see most of the time is sitting on top of that grotty opening. After that the game just piles on stranger stuff and none of it explains why.
The Idler loop
Over time a heart counter slowly climbs. It looks time-related more than anything else. I could not work out how to make it go quicker or earn more. As the number goes up, more hamburgers unlock as pets that follow you around. That is the Idler side of it.
You can sit on the hamburgers and ride them. They look different from each other, one of them has a hat, but I never worked out if there was a benefit to picking one over another beyond that.
Hearts also unlock dancing, though mine did nothing I could spot. I found a golden hamburger that goes in a showcase back at the house, one more thing I collected without knowing why.
Horror, money, and furniture
You can flick lights in the house on and off. Turn them off and sometimes, not always, there is a body that looks a lot like your girl, hung from the ceiling. That is the Horror in the pitch, one image, no explanation, and then back to hamburgers.
Go outside and there are banknotes with pig legs and pig tails, squeaking like pigs. You run over them for money and spend it on furniture, a sofa, a bed, a wardrobe. Again, for reasons I do not know.
The nightclub and a bloody penguin
You can travel to a nightclub packed with giant food, pizza and the rest, walking up and down between it. You can dance in there too.
Eventually I found an Easter egg, a penguin covered in blood carrying an axe, that follows you around instead of a burger. That is where the penguin was hiding.
By the end I still could not tell you who this is for, or what winning looks like.
Developer: HiderumStudios / HiderumStudios
View on Steam
Tags: Horror, Cute, Casual, Idler, Indie
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