How To Make Eggplant Lasagna (With Cats!)

Okay, yes, I’ll confess it, when I read the title I did a double take and my brain couldn’t help making a terrible joke: “you just slice them really thin and layer them, same as the eggplant.” I can’t have been the only one who thought that, right?

I am going to hell.

Despite the evidence of that first paragraph, I actually do like animals quite a lot (including cats!) and so the wholesome comedy on display here quickly put that awkwardness in the past. How to Make Eggplant Lasagna was an entry in the heretofore-unknown-to-me Recipe Jam, games entered into which were supposed to incorporate a complete, cookable recipe (my brain also can’t help wondering whether anyone submitted an entry with a literal recipe for jam: it’d be the Recipe Game Jam jam recipe game). The approach to the theme here is straightforward: you’re trying to cook the eponymous recipe, but you also have two cats who like to involve themselves in the process, and making lasagna is of course relatively time-consuming, with a bunch of different time-dependent steps where a distraction can make things go awry…

I am a sucker for the one-thing-going-wrong-after-another silliness of farce, and cooking provides a perfect framework for escalating accidents, mistakes, and bad judgment calls to threaten to bring everything crashing down into disaster, while having adorable and (mostly) innocent kitties be the vectors of destruction keeps things from getting ill-spirited. And the comedy here is very well done – a solid three quarters of my notes for this game just consist of pasted-in excerpts with me saying “lol” right after them. An example at random:

"Unfortunately it’s Boris. He’s the bigger (and dumber) of your two cats, but despite having the body of a black fuzzy cinder block he also has the soul of a small Victorian orphan."

Another:

"You scoop up Natasha and place her on the ground. She hops right back up on the stove. Having been left with no alternative, you grab your trusty squirt bottle and squirt her right in the face. She blinks at you indignantly and doesn’t move."

Structurally, you face a gauntlet of one dilemma after another: do you try to keep your workspace clear of cats, or leave them be so long as they’re far enough away that you can get your chopping done? When they start to tear things apart in the other room, do you pause your cooking or just let them cause damage until they get bored? There’s rarely a clear right answer, as the best-case scenario typically only allows you to keep chaos at bay for a few more minutes, but at a cost of losing some of the ingredients, or cutting short a key step in the cooking, or just tiring yourself out. I’m not actually sure what’s going on under the hood, here – there aren’t interface elements telling you how much time you have left to cook, or anything else to provide you with an objective view of how you’re doing. And when I replayed, it sometimes felt like slightly different challenges were being thrown at me even when I made similar choices leading up to them. I sometimes felt that there might be a degree of randomness determining which events happened, and sometimes that there were a few key statistics being tracked, but whether it’s one or the other, or both, I think this black-box approach was a good one: nothing kills farce deader than it feeling mechanical, so the obfuscation was worth it in my book (though I did notice one slight inconsistency: in my most successful playthrough, I was told I’d made a lasagna whose “cheese on top is beautifully crispy”, which sounds nice except the last decision I’d made before popping it in the oven was to cut my losses and not chase Natasha around in a futile attempt to get back the cheese package so I could sprinkle the final layer on top).

So yeah, if you like cooking, cats, or shenanigans, I think you’ll have fun with this one – it honestly made me glad I’m usually only cooking with a toddler these days, since at least he mostly understands English and only takes perverse delight in throwing everything everywhere like 15% of the time, meaning he compares favorably to a cat on both of those criteria. It’s funny, the cats are cut; heck, the recipe even sounds good, though I’m not fool enough to try anything this complex until my son’s much older.