The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty

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The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty review
Samuel Corey

Review

Unsentimental Journey

Apocalypse Then


People living in comfortable, modern societies have a ridiculous tendency to romanticize the collapse of society. Just look at the prevalence of harmless fantasies about surviving in a Dawn of the Dead-style zombie apocalypse. Video games in particular are prone to romanticize the end of the world with numerous depictions of wacky (Fallout, Rage) or thrilling (The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn).

Yet, were society to break down tomorrow and collapse into a lawless and chaotic wasteland it wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened. History is replete with examples and without exception, they are never wacky and seldom thrilling. Instead, these localized historical apocalypses were mostly grim and miserable affairs where more people died from starvation than Mad Max car battles.

The Hungry Lamb, a recent Chinese Visual Novel, is set in one such period of history, near the end of the Ming Dynasty in China where the Middle Kingdom was beset by invasion, rebellion, plague, famine, drought, and all manner of administrative SNAFUs. The game opts for a very realistic depiction of these times, not blinking for a second when depicting any of the cruelties of the time be they grandiose or mundane. In general, the hard-nosed and cynical population of China are less squeamish or sentimental than their counterparts in the West, but even by those standards this game pulls very few punches. This is the sort of game where a character will cook and eat her daughter's cat, and then act surprised when the daughter is upset about it.



One Nasty Job


For an example of how unsentimental this game is, just take a look at our protagonist, a bandit named Liang. We're introduced to him slitting a traveller's throat and then looting the body. He's a bit like Joel from The Last of Us, except where that game left Joel's most heinous actions up to the player's imagination, The Hungry Lamb immediately confronts us with Liang in the midst of committing a vicious crime. That most players will eventually come to feel sympathy after this first scene is a testament to the game's writing.

That said, while Liang is every inch the vicious ne'er-do-well who has lived off violence and robbery for most of his adult life, he does still have a few scruples. He doesn't hurt women and children directly, he doesn't traffic in slaves, and he doesn't screw whores. He decides to break the second of these tenets when his friend and fellow scoundrel, Tongue, happens upon a job that sounds too good to be true. Four hundred silver coins in exchange for taking four prepubescent slave girls to the distant city of Luoyang to serve as maids or concubines for a wealthy merchant there.

The player will probably realize that nothing about this job adds up. The collapse of the Ming Dynasty was a period of strife and famine, and most peasants would jump at the chance to sell a couple of surplus daughters into the relative luxury of a steady maid job. There's no reason to buy girls from the next province over when there is no shortage of them nearby. The extra risks and costs make sense with one of the girls, Qinghua, who is the kidnapped daughter of a disgraced official. However, the other three are just farmer's daughters who could just as easily be found in the countryside around Luoyang.

Liang, perhaps blinded by the flash of silver, doesn't consider this until confronted by another of the girls, Man Sui, who tells him that she knows they are being taken to a Swine Demon who devours little girls. Man Sui isn't being forthcoming, as she claims that this demon has already devoured her sister and she knows its true nature because her sister's ghost visited her in a dream. This isn't true, and Liang is not dumb enough to believe the slave girl outright, but it does get him thinking about the job he's taken and how it doesn't add up. This revelation starts him down the gradual road toward redemption.

Lost in Translation


The characters, plot, and world-building of The Hungry Lamb are all superlative. The only thing that lets the story down is the translation. It is a rough job put out by an enthusiastic amateur rather than someone with a deep knowledge of the English language. There are some small flubs throughout including some typos like "lamb" being written as "lamp" on a couple of occasions. Like most native Chinese speakers I've met, the translator has some trouble with English tenses here and there. Some translation decisions are just baffling. It's weird to see bandits in the 1600s refer to slavery by the modern, politically correct, and sanitized term: "human trafficking."

That said, I can't get too upset about anything in this translation. It is obviously the work of someone passionate about the story they were telling and wanted to share it with the largest possible audience they could. It's also someone with a degree of reverence for the story, as I've seen the translator respond to numerous bad reviews across the English apologizing for his work if it has caused them to misread the story. In a world where games and anime are often mistranslated to include irrelevant political messages or jokes about Gamergate, I cannot hold the rough but faithful work of this translator in much contempt.


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9.0

fun score

Pros

Very compelling characters, Beautiful character designs, Makes use of its historical setting to great effect.

Cons

Story is unrelentingly bleak, Translation is rough at times