Don’t Feed

Don’t Feed is a fantasy-themed real-time strategy game released in 2017 for Windows and Macintosh. Developed and published by Ravinia, this free-to-play title challenges players with tactical decision-making in a magical setting. The game features a diagonal-down perspective and real-time pacing, offering a classic strategy experience where players must manage resources and command units to achieve victory against various opponents.

Don’t Feed: A Phantom in the Catalog – Unraveling the Mystery of a Lost Game

In the vast and meticulously documented annals of video game history, some titles are celebrated, some are reviled, and a rare few exist as spectral enigmas, known more for their absence than their presence. ‘Don’t Feed’ (2017) by Ravinia is one such phantom. This review seeks to excavate the truth behind a game that left almost no cultural footprint, a title that serves as a fascinating case study in the challenges of digital preservation and the blurred lines between inspiration, iteration, and entirely separate entities in the indie game space.

Development History & Context

A Studio in the Shadows
The development studio Ravinia is a ghost in the machine. Beyond the name, no public credits, developer commentaries, or post-mortems exist for ‘Don’t Feed’. Released in the midst of the 2010s indie game explosion, a period defined by breakout hits on platforms like Steam, ‘Don’t Feed’ arrived as a freeware title. Its business model—free-to-play—and its genre—diagonal-down, real-time fantasy strategy—suggest aspirations that were either modest or never fully realized.

The Technological and Cultural Landscape
By 2017, the tools for game development were more accessible than ever. Engines like Unity and Unreal were democratizing creation, yet ‘Don’t Feed’ opted for a perspective (diagonal-down) that harkened back to the classic era of real-time strategy games like Warcraft II or Command & Conquer. This was a curious choice; while not obsolete, this viewpoint was no longer the industry standard for the genre, suggesting a development possibly rooted in nostalgia or a specific, limited technical proficiency. The gaming landscape was, and still is, also crowded with games that use imperative titles as warnings or commands (Don’t Starve, Do Not Feed the Monkeys), placing ‘Don’t Feed’ in a naming convention trend it did not originate but perhaps hoped to leverage.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

Here, the historical record fails us utterly. With no official description, no player reviews, and no available gameplay footage, the narrative and themes of ‘Don’t Feed’ are a complete mystery. The title itself is a provocative, fragmentary command. It implies a central mechanic or a core moral choice: a prohibition against feeding something.

• The Speculative Narrative: One can extrapolate from the title and genre. In a fantasy strategy setting, “Don’t Feed” could point to a mechanic where the player must manage resources and avoid empowering a specific enemy. Perhaps it involved a besieged town where throwing food to monsters outside the walls would temporarily satiate them but make them stronger later. Or maybe it was a ecological strategy game about managing an ecosystem where feeding one creature would upset the natural balance.
• Thematic Absence: The lack of any information makes it impossible to analyze its themes with any authority. It exists as a thematic void, a blank canvas upon which only its name is painted. This stands in stark contrast to other games with similar names, which are rich with thematic purpose, as seen in the critique of dystopian surveillance in Do Not Feed the Monkeys.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Again, we are left with the barest of frameworks from its MobyGames classification. We know it was a real-time strategy/tactics game from a diagonal-down perspective. We can assume it involved standard RTS hallmarks: resource gathering, base building, and unit command.

• The Core Loop (Presumed): The most logical assumption is that the “Don’t Feed” command was integrated into its core loop. Perhaps the player gathered a resource (food) and had to choose between using it to build units/structures or “feeding” it to an adversary, with the latter choice creating a short-term benefit but a long-term catastrophe.
• A Flawed or Unfinished System? The complete absence of any player engagement or reviews is the most telling critique of its mechanics. In an era where even the most flawed games find an audience, silence suggests that ‘Don’t Feed’ may have been mechanically broken, utterly derivative, or simply unfinished upon release. Its freeware status supports the theory that it was an early project, perhaps a prototype released into the wild that failed to capture any attention.

World-Building, Art & Sound

There is nothing to describe. No screenshots were preserved. No promotional art was uploaded. The visual and auditory identity of ‘Don’t Feed’ is lost. It is a game without a face or a voice. This profound lack is its most defining characteristic from a preservation standpoint. It is a data point, not an experience.

Reception & Legacy

Critical and Commercial Reception
The reception was non-existent. There are zero critic reviews and, more strikingly, zero player reviews on its primary database entry. It was commercially free and yet failed to attract any players willing to document their experience. It was a release that was, for all intents and purposes, stillborn.

A Complicated Legacy: Mistaken Identity and Historical Conflation
The true legacy of ‘Don’t Feed’ is one of confusion and digital echo. Its name has been almost entirely co-opted by a later, more conceptually defined title: Don’t Feed It (2025) by CapCrowGames.

• The Successor That Overshadowed the Original: Don’t Feed It is a first-person psychological horror game inspired by PSX and analog horror aesthetics. Its premise—being trapped in a cabin with a entity you must feed during the day but never at night—is rich with narrative tension and has garnered descriptive coverage. Online gaming portals like Project Sekai and Scary-HorrorGame.com describe its atmosphere of dread, its rule-based gameplay, and its multiple endings in detail.
• A Historical Merging: In digital searches and within the databases of gaming history, these two distinct games are now forever linked. ‘Don’t Feed’ (2017) is the answer to a trivia question: “What game shares a name with a popular horror title but is something completely different?” Its legacy is to be a footnote, a reference point for the other, more successful Don’t Feed It. This creates a unique phenomenon where the original’s obscurity is highlighted by the success of its namesake.

Conclusion

‘Don’t Feed’ is not a bad game. It is not a good game. It is, effectively, an un-game. It is a entry in a database, a string of code lost to time, a title without a body of work. Its historical value lies not in what it is, but in what it represents: the countless projects that vanish into the ether, the ambitious ideas that never find their audience, and the immense challenge of preserving every facet of an increasingly vast digital medium. As a piece of entertainment, it offers nothing to analyze. As a subject for a game historian, it is a poignant reminder of the fragility of digital creation. The final, definitive verdict on ‘Don’t Feed’ is that it is a ghost, a cautionary tale about the importance of documentation, and a curious asterisk in the story of its far more evocative successor. It is the video game equivalent of a whisper in an empty room—you know it happened, but there’s no proof it was ever really there.