Eikas

Well, this was a pleasure. It’s rare (to me) to find a long, well-paced, polished Twine game with nice presentation, few bugs, good characters and a satisfying story arc. Usually games have both significant strengths and significant flaws, but I really didn’t find any major flaws in this game, which was very pleasant. (Of course this might just be to my tastes, of course; other people may have a different reaction)

You play as a chef who has been hired on to cook every 5 days at a community canteen in a magical village. There are several characters you can interact with, each of which is going through their own issues and having their own successes. Your goal is to be able to stay as a chef permanently, with side goals of improving relations with others.

The majority of the game is part of a 4-action daily cycle, where you can choose to cook things to sell at the market and then to buy things at the market (probably the most common option), interact with your friends, make special meals for the community, buy seeds and books (useful early on), go foraging (useful later on, etc.).

Every 5 days you make a special meal which gets judged. Despite my best efforts, my first meal got 1 star, so I worked hard to get better. I ended up getting exactly the amount of stars I needed to ‘stay’ (having only played once, I don’t know if it’s designed always to play out that way or if it was due to my eggs-and-cheese heavy strategies of making deluxe meals).

Overall, the tone is pleasant. There are some stresses, especially with friends, but the tone is one of peace and warmth. It’s not overly cloying to me, when it could easily have been so, and the game doesn’t force you into specific actions of reproach or forgiveness, instead allowing you to chart your own path.

Overall, a great game for someone looking to relax and cook.

Eikas is a community kitchen management sim. The PC has moved to a small, rural town in a gently fantastical setting to work as a chef, employed by the town council, which sponsors a community feast every five days. The game covers their one-month probationary period before becoming a full employee.

In between feasts, you can garden, shop for ingredients, learn new recipes, get to know the townsfolk, and make snacks to sell for extra cash because the stipend from the town council doesn’t quite stretch far enough (a bit of less-than-idyllic realism that I appreciated). I found it very satisfying to gradually expand my repertoire, and the scores for my meals increased pretty steadily as the game went on, making me feel like I was authentically growing as a chef. Plus, all the food sounded delicious.

The four characters you can befriend are also endearing; my favorite was the initially prickly artist Antonia, possibly because I feel like she has the most substantial arc as she regains artistic inspiration and learns to open up to people again after an experience with an artistic and personal partnership that went south.

(I will confess to not loving the “I thought I didn’t like small-town life but I see now that it’s actually the best!” trope, which crops up a couple times with the companions, but that’s a me problem, I think. It feels tiresomely ubiquitous in fiction sometimes, but I gather “of course everyone wants to leave their small town” can feel that way too, and it probably depends on what kind of fiction you consume and which angle you’re more annoyed by.)

I did end up feeling like the game was a little too low-key overall; I like my management sims to stress me out a bit, whereas here I usually felt like I had plenty of time for everything that I wanted to do. Indeed, by the run-up to the final meal I had maxed everyone’s approval, unlocked every recipe, and served a four-star meal, and started to feel like I was aimlessly killing time until the last day. But that’s also a personal preference, and I think the lack of tension is probably just what some people are looking for in this kind of game.

Which is essentially my overall feeling about Eikas: there were a few things that were minuses for me, but all of them are things I can easily imagine being pluses for someone else. I think it’s one of the best games of IFComp2024 and I ultimately enjoyed it a lot, even if I occasionally wished it were just a little less relaxing.

(based on the IFComp 2024 version)


Stuffed peppers! Garlic broccoli! Balsamic roasted veggies!

The main objective of this game felt like a nice hot plate of comfort food to me. Cooking. Fussing over recipe-books, matching entrée to main course to side dish. Going to the market on a tight budget and somehow finding everything I need for that one course I had in mind but wasn’t sure I’d be able to buy all the ingredients for.

The frame-story and the mildly fantastic setting add lots of flavour and variety, with good-natured acquantances to make, fragments of the setting’s history to discover, spontaneous acts of good will to help villagers in need to fill out the world and your protagonist’s place in it.

I found that Eikas kept a good balance between allowing the player time to explore the village and the valley, and dropping enough reminders to add a little pressure to shop for groceries, plan your menu with care, and prepare the Great Hall for the evening of the feast.

My main naggle is that I couldn’t switch or add ingredients to the predetermined recipes. Adding a handfull of lemon basil to a deluxe kedgeree will bring out a freshness and aromatic quality that parsley alone would not, for example…

Very fun exploration/resource-management hybrid.