Eikas

(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.