Don't Let It Starve is a Balatro-style bento box roguelike with a retro horror skin

Don't Let It Starve, developed by Eduardo Scarpato and Black Lantern Collective, is the latest entry in the post-Balatro wave of "number go up" roguelikes — this one built around filling bento boxes with Tetris-shaped food items in a creepy purgatory setting where you're feeding an endlessly hungry creature.

The core loop has you slotting T-shaped cuts of meat, square rice blocks, and other food pieces into bento boxes, chasing combo bonuses like "Death" (three sausages) or "Burger" (two breads plus a cut of beef) to rack up multipliers. Ingredients come with their own point values and drop rates — that one-square pickle you desperately need? It has a 4% drop rate. Re-rolls are available but limited, and the randomness can feel punishing when the right shape simply refuses to appear across ten consecutive re-rolls.

Polygon's reviewer spent 90 minutes with it as part of the site's Random Select column — a feature where writers are assigned a game blind and must play for at least an hour. The verdict was lukewarm: the bento-building puzzle is fun for a few rounds, but the dopamine loop fades faster than in stronger genre entries. The reviewer flagged that luck feels like a bigger factor than skill, which undercuts the optimization the game is clearly going for.

That said, the reviewer acknowledges being a self-described skeptic of the genre, and Don't Let It Starve is freshly released with only around 100 Steam reviews so far — too early to call it a miss. If you're already hooked on Balatro-style games, the retro horror aesthetic and food-combo twist might be exactly the spin you're looking for.