Eat Your Young

In Eat Your Young, you play an alien critter called a "gribb" wandering about a 2D landscape and killing and eating other critters. There are 13 levels, and each level has a different objective. You could call it a 2D overhead shooter, except that it's more of a 2D overhead eater.

Your gribb has three stats, for melee combat, ranged combat (you spit acid, apparently), and teleportation. What you eat changes your stats -- e.g., eating birds (which you need ranged combat to kill) improves your ranged combat stat. But it's a triangular trade-off; improving one stat means reducing the others. In principle, this allows you to customize your beastie, with different tactics appropriate to different approaches.

When you've made five kills, you can return to "your cave" (at the level's upper left) and "breed" with the female of your kind, who apparently never leaves the cave. The main purpose of this is to create offspring whom you can then kill and eat; eating your own young is the only way to regain health, which is important, because the critters you kill fight back. Among the critters are local natives (who can teleport) and human big-game hunters, who would be delighted to mount your head on the wall of their den, but whom you can also eat.

As with many student projects, Eat Your Young is a little rough -- in some cases, the game doesn't seem to notice when you accomplish the ostensible task required; and a surprising amount of attention has been spent on irrelevant surrounding detail -- backstory and images to dress up interstitial UI, for instance. But it's cute, and mildly disturbing.