Originally for the iOS and later ported to PSP and Vita, this game is an endless "climber" in which the basic premise is that you control a giraffe whose neck extends as you stuff its face with more and more food. The only reason that you get for doing this comes from the title, there is no story, no text and no cutscenes. This is understandable considering that this is a PlayStation Mini. That said, the mobile elements are still apparent, even when you pay good money for this game. The gameplay revolves around using the left stick to move your giraffe left and right (alternatively, you can use the motion control, which is less accurate), aiming for food which will give you momentum to reach higher and higher, while at the same time avoiding obstacles.
These obstacles range from anvils (knocks you back down), poison (blocks part of the screen) and pills (weird effects such as mirroring controls or stops all input). Now, the most annoying feature of this game is that once you hit an obstacle, there's something like a 15% chance of managing to get enough food to stop your descent and claw back up to continue. Most of the time, you die and you have to repeat the stage again. Sure, there are power ups that you can buy which lets you recover instantly but the fact that it's down to luck and not skill on whether there is enough food to regain your momentum is frustrating and evil. There are ten stages in all, after which it loops back to the first stage. Each level has a slightly different background (playing into the climbing theme, you start off in a forest and then eventually get to outer space.
As you'd expect, the higher the stage, the more difficult it is. Be prepared to die quite a bit when you first reach Stage 10 as there are some areas with sparse food such that if you miss one, it's game over. The obstacle patterns tend to repeat, this is a case where if you play the game long enough, you will be able to breeze through the level. Of course, once it starts to loop, the difficulty starts to drop back down and slowly rises again. You can finish all ten stages in around an hour if you keep dying and much quicker if you're proficient. Now, you earn "calories" for each food item you eat and there are the in-game currency to which you buy upgrades or items which saves you. This is also where the greed comes in. You can opt to pay real money (on top on what you paid to get the game) to get more of this in-game currency.
The in-game currency accumulates so slowly and the upgrades are excessively expensive (and there's no multiplier that you can earn like other endless runners) that it makes it obvious the developers really want you to spend the extra dough. The Vita version comes with Trophy support, which is always awesome except... the trophies are very grindy. It is estimated to take 50 hours for one of them because you have to accumulate enough points through normal play with no way to fast forward this. To those perfect 100% trophy completionists, have fun. I am not going to waste my time doing that as Hungry Giraffe is nowhere near good enough to waste my time on. That's the problem with it, you play one stage, you've played them all. The gameplay is too simple and repetitive to keep your attention.
The developers should have added in some sort of objective system to keep it fresher. The only other reason you would ever come back is to beat your high score. The graphics are mediocre, I mean, this kind of game doesn't benefit from high-end graphics so what you get is what you would expect. The music is also average, it seems to have this classical touch to it and it's soothing to listen to when playing (except when you keep dying for no good reason). On the whole Hungry Giraffe is a simple and repetitive game that I would expect to get as a free app on your phone, not something that I would pay money for and definitely not something I would use even more money on in-app purchases. Ignoring that factor, this is still a fairly bland game, save your Vita for worthier games and download better alternatives on your phone (Frogger, Temple Run etc).
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