Two-Person Studio Clumsy Bear Takes Hungry Horrors to 1.0 on Steam

A self-funded, two-person British studio just finished the game it started building nearly three years ago. Clumsy Bear Studio released version 1.0 of Hungry Horrors on Steam on October 13, closing out roughly nine months of Early Access for a deckbuilder that asks players to feed British and Irish folklore monsters traditional home cooking instead of fighting them.

The studio's own 1.0 patch notes frame the moment simply: "After two and a half years, we're proud to announce that the full version of Hungry Horrors is now available!" Hungry Horrors first reached Steam Early Access on January 19, and the full release follows a run of 250-plus user reviews sitting at 98% positive.

What 1.0 actually adds

The headline change is the Megaliths, a new biome that unlocks once players clear the game's earlier regions and finally lets them see the campaign through to an ending. The patch notes list four new Megaliths-exclusive Horrors to cook for, including a Dragon, alongside new mechanics, familiars, dishes, ingredients and artefacts folded into the run-based structure. A fresh batch of Steam achievements ships alongside the content.

Players who stuck with the Early Access build keep their unlocked recipes, seasonings and abilities, since Hungry Horrors carries progression between runs rather than resetting everything on a content update. That persistence has been a consistent thread through the game's nine-plus months of updates, with Clumsy Bear Studio pushing incremental patches and balance passes that the studio's public patch notes track version by version, rather than saving every change for a single finale.

Cooking as combat

The premise stays unchanged from Early Access: a spoiled princess, more used to servants than labor, has to break a curse that's turned every creature of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh folklore into a ravenous "Horror." Instead of swords, she carries a deck of real British and Irish recipes, from Cranachan and Yorkshire pudding to jellied eels and toad in the hole, now numbering 62 dishes in the finished game.

Every dish carries one of five flavours, salty, sour, savoury, bitter or sweet, and every Horror craves some flavours while despising others. Reading an opponent right and chaining the correct flavours fills its hunger meter before its own attack meter fills; reading it wrong turns the princess into the next course. Cookware equipment and card seasoning let players bend those encounters further, and the roster now spans 13 named folkloric characters across the full campaign.

Outside of battle, the princess travels an overworld built from dark woods, misty lochs and gloomy meadows, trading with merchants, fishing up ingredients and recruiting a familiar to follow along and sniff out hidden potions. It's a structure closer to a narrative adventure than a straight roguelike, with named folklore figures to talk to and quest for between the card fights that make up the game's combat.

The flavour-chain system is also where the "real recipes" framing pays off: because dishes are tagged by actual British and Irish ingredients and techniques rather than invented fantasy food, learning what a Horror is drawn from in regional folklore doubles as a hint about what it might crave at the table.

That premise is why the game stood out from the early footage onward. Clumsy Bear Studio's press kit still frames the pitch the same way it did at reveal: defeat monsters not by hurting them, but by feeding them until they're full.

Two ways to play

Hungry Horrors ships two modes in its full release: Campaign, the roguelite story mode with a choice between standard Vanilla difficulty and a harder Spicy setting, and Banquet, a shorter, tougher roguelike run built for players who already know the recipes and want a tighter challenge. Both share the same card pool and flavour system, just at different paces.

A small team with an early trophy case

Clumsy Bear Studio's profile has been building for a while outside the Early Access numbers. The studio won the Indie Showcase Award at Develop:Brighton 2025 for Hungry Horrors before the game had even left Early Access, an early signal from the UK industry that a two-person team had built something worth watching. That trajectory, demo to showcase award to a sustained Early Access run to a finished 1.0, is the kind of arc the Indie section exists to track. It also means the finished game arrives with an unusually long public track record: nine months of patch notes, community feedback threads and balance changes that a two-person team handled without a publisher's marketing budget behind it.

Price and where to get it

Hungry Horrors is priced at $14.99 on Steam for Windows, macOS and Linux, discounted 20% to $11.99 through October 19 as a launch sale. A free demo remains available on the Steam store page for players who want to try the opening biome before buying. Clumsy Bear Studio has not announced console release dates for Hungry Horrors as of this writing; anything beyond PC should be treated as unconfirmed until the studio says otherwise.

For a team that built the entire game themselves, shipping 1.0 while holding a 98% positive rating is its own kind of milestone, and one worth noting for anyone who likes their deckbuilders with a side of regional cooking history.