Filipino horror game Hapunan is about escaping police brutality and selling fertilised duck eggs

Today I learned about balut, a street food of the Philippines. It’s a fertilized duck egg, boiled or steamed, in which you can still see the duck embryo as you munch. I’m too old to discover this acquired taste on a gap year, but I’m not too old to waltz down the horror aisle in Itch.io, throwing retro jumpscarers into my basket. Which is where first-person Filipino suspense game Hapunan can be found. You play a young street food vendor hawking the eggs on a quiet corner late at night. Naturally, something alarming is afoot. There is talk on the radio of dangerous folk out at night…

For the most part, it’s a by-the-numbers horror game. There is darkness to be illuminated by flashlight. There are jumpy moments when you turn to see someone unexpected right in your face. And there is an exponential uptick of schlock as the 20-30 minute game reaches its ending. The final scene is strangely goofy, proving as ever that horror and comedy are secretly the same genre. But like balut itself, there are some unsettling veins hidden under this shell.

I enjoy the setting for one thing – a cramped family house in a quiet neighbourhood, its windows and doors all needing to be locked before you leave for work. The faces of your family, your customers, and the local government chief are all rendered with the low-poly photorealism of an N64 game. Imagine the scientists of Golden Eye if they were all in shorts and t-shirts and desperate to buy a bag of pork rinds (the other thing you sell is chicharon).

Then there are the twisted creepypasta faces of the threatening figures who lurk out of the shadows one night when you’re about to start selling. Your mother has heard all about these men on the radio. A rash of “pay-to-kill” murders has been spreading through the country. You soon discover that the horror of this game is not some otherworldly phantom or monstrous entity. But the simple brutality of a gun.

In 2017 the Philippines saw a surge of extrajudicial killings, the results of a “crackdown” by former president Rodrigo Duterte. Police officers were offered payouts for killing anyone they loosely deemed a suspect of various crimes. Police and other perpetrators killed as many as 30,000 civilians. Amnesty International called it a “murderous war on the poor” that created “an informal economy of death”. The game isn’t explicit about any of this, but then it probably doesn’t need to be. The faces of the gunmen wear permanent grins. At one point you are handed a license to sell your food by the captain in the local government office. It says “SAFE” in big, unconvincing letters.

In other words, it’s a short piece of Filipino homebrew horror that has a little more recent history behind it than first appears. A reminder that sometimes horror really happens. Hapunan is currently $3.99 on Itch.io. That’s the cost of 16 balut.