Mario ate mushrooms. Pac-Man ate everything. Minecraft players have had to make do with a pixellated block of cake. But food in videogames has come a long way since. Some feature extravagant feasts. On offer at the Astera Canteen in the 2018 action role-playing game Monster Hunter World, are steaks, grilled meats and seafood. In Cooking Mama (2006), a motherly chef guides you into making the perfect Japanese tonkatsu (a crispy fried pork cutlet) to go with fresh cabbage salad. Of all the mouth-watering dishes that can be cooked on Final Fantasy 15 (2016), there’s nothing more appetising than the creamy crustacean omelette, a fluffy egg meal topped with crab meat.
Food has been an unusual but significant marker in videogame development. They’ve served as power-ups – quick boosts of energy for battle-worn, or struggling players. They offer restorative, strength-giving abilities. Often, as in Stardew Valley (2016), they just make for great gifts to win friends over. They’re now shaping up as a way to represent complex concepts of love, loss, and identity to tell deeper, personal stories about culture.
Venba, by the Toronto-based Visai Studios, is a narrative cooking game that will release later this year. It puts the spotlight on the everyday challenges of immigrant families and the richness of Tamil culture through food. In the upcoming platform game After School Afterlife, created by Singaporean studio Mini Bunnies, players must escape a haunted mansion by feeding hungry ghosts iconic dishes from Peranakan cuisine. Lutong Bahay: Lola’s home cooking, developed by Philippines-based Team Meowfia and published by game studio Senshi Labs, was released in December 2020, and is centered around Filipino culture. The protagonist Maricela inherits her grandmother’s carinderia or food stall.
Venba follows the story of an Indian immigrant mother who moves with her family to Canada in the 1980s. Through mini puzzles, players reconstruct the lead character Venba’s cookbook of Tamil recipes passed down from her mother, which was damaged during the life-altering move. Once the missing pieces are found and the recipe is put together, dishes like puttu (cylindrical steamed coconut and rice flour cakes), soft idlis, masala-coated fish fry and layered biryani can be assembled. “Food plays a large role in our culture and is often used to express love and affection,” says the game’s 29-year-old creative director, Abhi who uses only one name. “With a very real language barrier, Venba often heavily relies on the food she cooks to convey a lot of unsaid things to her son, Kavin.”
Watch: Check out new food games that are changing the narrative
Venba’s story is inspired by Abhi’s experiences of moving to Toronto from Chennai at 12. He grew up very connected to Tamil culture, films, and music. “A lot of immigrant stories are told from the perspective of children and how they find fitting into society hard,” he says “I felt that the story of the parents, who moved from home to a foreign land only to feel alienated from their own children, needed to be brought to the fore.”
Lutong Bahay means home-cooked in Tagalog, the language spoken in the Philippines. The protagonist Maricela travels through the country to discover its rich culinary traditions, learns how to cook iconic dishes from different provinces and connects with the local culture. Players interact with locals and learn how to make delicious Filipino street foods such as the heart-of-palm spring rolls and pork sisig (minced meat with onions and chilli peppers).
After School Afterlife, meanwhile, offers a deep dive into the varied cultural roots of Singapore’s Peranakan cuisine. It combines Chinese, Malaysian, and Indonesian ingredients to create tangy, spicy, and aromatic dishes. Obstacles in the game include Chinese vampires called jiāngshī, who must be fed ayam buah keluak, a decadent chicken gravy with rempah (a Peranakan spice paste) and poisonous nuts. Or running a haunted coffee shop that serves up a frothy tea called teh tarik and traditional sugared black coffee called kopi-o. Players unravel facets of Peranakan culture, by exploring the mansion, talking to game-show hosting demons and ghosts looking for love, even making journal entries of the food and customs they encounter.
Several videogames feature food. But ones with cooking driving the narrative are hard to come by. One of the biggest challenges is recreating traditional and complex recipes without overwhelming the player. In Lutong Bahay, there are three stages for every dish: prep, cooking, and serving. For Venba, Abhi and his team tested the recipes several times to work out how to properly adapt them to the videogame format. He is now obsessed with watching recipe videos. “Cooking in media is often showcased gratuitously but sometimes we cook even when we don’t want to. We’ve tried to touch upon this not only in the story but also through gameplay.”
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