If fantasy stories have taught me anything, it’s that having a dragon on your side is infinitely better than having it oppose you. So when one of Feed the Scorchpot’s dragons proposed to keep them fed in return for an alliance, I felt very motivated to grow as many crops as I could. But those dragons, they do seem to get hungry a lot…
In Feed the Scorchpot, you set out to keep your (begrudging) neighbourly dragon well fed for a run of twenty years straight. Do so, and your island will prosper. Fail, and suffer the consequences. It’s a really interesting premise for a game that ultimately plays a lot like it wants you to watch numbers go up in a similar fashion to something like Balatro. Does that seem like two concepts that wouldn’t match? Surprisingly, you’d be very wrong with that assumption!
The game starts off simple enough. Your island is divided into hexes, with each of these hexes giving you a type of ingredient to farm. Each hex also has a number on top of it, which becomes important when you realise that you’ll be rolling dice. You start out with three six-sided dice, and it’s the totals of two of them that will determine which ingredient will be farmed this season. Those ingredients will in turn be cooked into a meal for the dragon, hoping that they’ll be satisfied with your offering.
You aren’t forced to rely on hope, however; there are plenty of ways you can affect what’ll happen each season. You, of course, get re-rolls for your dice, and there are buildings such as farms and shrines you can buy to connect your lands together and optimise your harvest. Then there are the recipes you can buy, which transform your meals into something more than just a hodgepodge of ingredients. Use those to boost flavour and essence, which in turn will multiply your fodder score, seeing you rake in huge numbers if you play it right.
Eventually, you’ll also be able to buy different dice and customise what’s in your dice tray. Finetune this, and you’ll be able to rake in even more points in your quest to feed the dragon. As you might have noticed, Feed the Scorchpot is all about building a point-scoring machine. The married developer duo actively wants you to break the game by building hexes that quench all feelings of hunger once and for all. Manage to feed the dragon in fewer seasons, and the rewards will be bigger as well.
But of course, not everything will go your way. With dice rolls there will always be an amount of peril to consider, but the dragons might just occasionally interfere as well. This can happen in the form of tantrums, where they burn particular hexes on your island, losing those resources as you still try to feed them. Depending on which dragon you’re trying to befriend – and there are quite a few of them – and the difficulty setting you choose when starting your run, they will interfere in a plethora of ways, all creating new challenges for you to overcome.
This basically makes the game infinitely replayable. There’s a reason why Balatro is cited as an inspiration: this is one of those games that will ease you in with its quick-to-pick-up gameplay before getting under your skin with just how hard it can be to master. It’s very hard to put into words just how good it feels to get massive scores with your harvests or to barely survive another year as you score just enough in your final season. The danger is always there; one wrong move and your entire run can come crashing down. But when you do find that way of overcoming the odds, it’s just bliss.
It helps that the game’s presentation is very much on point as well. The artwork is just gorgeous, reminiscent of medieval manuscripts, all hand-drawn by one of the developers. The mixture of visual art, understated music and addictive gameplay all do a great job here, creating something you’ll pick up for a quick run, only to find yourself hours later, still playing and praying this will be the run when you get lucky.
That’s not to say you won’t run into any frustration with the game, though. I had plenty of runs which were over before they even started, just because my earliest available recipes were of no use, or because the buildings I managed to buy early on didn’t help me at all. Obviously this is bound to happen in an RNG-heavy game, but I felt like it happened a bit too often to my liking. Maybe it’s a personal gripe, and I should just get better at the game, but it did put me off playing for a while.
And that’s a shame, because in the end, there’s a really good game here. Will it become as big as something like Balatro? Maybe not, as Feed the Scorchpot’s core gameplay might be just challenging enough to put more people off of the game than it should. But once people do take the step to start playing and understanding how the game’s engine-building works, they’ll be hooked. And with so many variables at play and difficulty options galore, you can be playing this for a good long while, especially as there are plenty of things hidden away behind certain achievements within the game, like most of the other dragons. So if you’re a completionist, get ready to put hours into this.
