Our Craft&Create Sale is up and about. A whole lot of titles that will spark your creativity like never before – careful potion crafting, building cities, cooking the most delicious dishes…Exactly, cooking. The very thing we’ll focus on in today’s article, in which we’re pleased to welcome Anita and Karolina, founders of
Nerds’ Kitchen project. It’s an incredible initiative; a culinary blog that attracts the attention to culinary elements in video games, as well as creats real-life recipes for video game food coherent with a given virtual universe.
Together with Nerds’ Kitchen we have created
three game collections:
Unconventional culinary themes in video games,
Cooking as a main element of crafting and survival, and
Games with memorable culinary approach, which Anita and Karolina agreed to elaborate on a little. Without further ado then – sit comfortably and better get ready, because after reading this article your tummy will surely end up grumbling. We’re passing the mic to
Nerds’ Kitchen!
Culinary themes have been present in video games from the very beginning, fulfilling a simple and understandable function for the player, consisting in restoring the health of the protagonist – and over time, more and more titles began to use them as a graceful tool, either as the leitmotif or to compliment the given title, building the immersiveness of the world. So, here are some examples of video games where food plays a variety of roles!WHERE’S THE LAMB SAUCE?!If you ever wanted to play the role of an innkeeper or a chef, the highlighted titles will bring you a bit closer to the kitchen facilities. You can prove yourself as a restaurant chef in the
Cook Serve Delicious series, or as a pizza expert in
Pizza Connection games, medieval inn owner in
Crossroads Inn, or together with your friends, bustle around the elaborate kitchen levels as efficiently as possible in
Overcooked series. Coffee lovers will also find something for themselves – whether finding themselves in the role of a detective acting under the guise of a coffee seller to solve the mystery of a disappearance in
Coffee Noir, or as a barista serving customers a variety of drinks while listening to their stories in
Coffee Talk.
HUNGRY LIKE A WOLFWhen you fall into the vortex of survival, remember about proper resource management – in this type of games you will encounter not only hunger or thirst, but also various mechanics related to the operation of certain consumer products. Long-term hunger or resorting to low-value food rations has unpleasant consequences in titles such as
Frostpunk,
This War of Mine or
Banished. A difficult task awaits you if you reach for
Don’t Starve,
The Flame in The Flood, and
We Happy Few, as well,where the consumption of spoiled products can lead to the unpleasantness of food poisoning. If, on the other hand, you’re in a mood for a more idyllic use of culinary themes, you can focus on the production and use of crops on the farm in
Stardew Valley, organising products in a kitchen in
Unpacking, or gathering ingredients and making heartwarming dishes out of them in
Spiritfarer.
SHOW ME YOUR GOODS…Culinary topics, thanks to the development of open-world games, have also gained more scope, regardless of whether the action takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or a medieval inn. Iguana on a stick from the Fallout series, a sweet bun from Skyrim, a chicken sandwich from The Witcher, or a beetle stew from Gothic – these are well known and recognizable by many players (and became even a subject of memes). Noteworthy is the use of culinary elements to characterize the climate of a given universe – be it, for example, street food in Night City in
Cyberpunk 2077, or the remains of goods after the collapse of the underwater city of Rapture in
Bioshock. In addition to meticulously designed graphic assets representing dishes or kitchens that can enchant with their details, these games often additionaly include colorful narrative references to food. These references appear in the form of book texts or notes, also during dialogues, cutscenes and quests. Popular examples are, for example, a recipe for a honey spice pie or a dinner with Keira Metz in
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt; lunch choice for Max in
Life is Strange; the diner scene in
Batman: Arkham Knight, or tasting stronger liquors in the Metro series; the quest to find ingredients for S'jirra's bread in Oblivion, or Thekla's stew in Gothic. Often, these games also offer cooking and crafting mechanics, for example a mod for Gothic II - Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos, or Pillars of Eternity, where we can prepare meals for the team.
DON’T PLAY WITH FOOD?If you want to break this iron rule from your childhood, the following titles are at your disposal. The offer includes, among others – unusual culinary weapons, for example a pea-shooting rifle in
Enter the Gungeon, banana grenades from
Worms, as well as a sensitive banana guide in
My Friend Pedro. Stock up on cartons full of cans of tomato soup and use it to survive in
60 Seconds and
Parsecs; or take part in the psychedelic game show in
Psychonauts 2, which will force you to cook a dish with an audience (literally!) consisting of food products. You will also have a difficult quest to complete in order to obtain ingredients for a rather "unusual" cake in
Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course; and traversing an ordinary kitchen will become quite a challenge for the tiny hero in
Tinykin. For thrill-seekers, there are also stronger accents – be it chef brothers from
Little Nightmares, whose restaurant would definitely not pass a sanitary inspection, as well as a macabre feast in
Rusty Lake Hotel, or an eerie tea party in
Fran Bow…
These culinary elements can become not only an engaging main theme of the game, but also a grateful tool for conveying information about a given universe, its culture or customs, which provides us, the players, with a more engaging and multi-layered experience. It is not uncommon for food-related themes to address more serious topics, such as important moral choices and their consequences that must be faced during a gameplay focused on resource management. In addition, food also works well as a thematic base with a humorous or surrealistic tint, thanks to which these accents are easily remembered. The examples described above are just a small part of what video games offer us in terms of cooking. Therefore, we encourage you to explore on your own not only the examples listed, but also search for other tasty motifs in virtual worlds!We’d like to thank
Nerds’ Kitchen for an interesting insight on culinaries in games! We're getting hungry just reading all that... It's probably time for lunch – in the meantime though, remember that you can find all the aforementioned games in special collections of Nerds' Kitchen,
here!
