Eikas

It is the mark of a lazy writer to reduce their criticism to “X is just like Y plus Z,” but I’ve tried to rewrite this opening several times now and there’s no way around it: Eikas is Stardew Valley plus cooking, there’s your pull quote. I guess to make it look like I actually put in some effort I can note that Eikas was the name of the ancient Epicureans’ monthly day of community and feasting.

That’s the kind of history-nerd content that’s a value-add for my reviews, right?

Joking aside, cottagecore life sim winds up being a great fit for choice-based IF, and Eikas is a robust and charming implementation of the idea even if it’s not the most original thing in the world. You play a chef recruited to a village to run their community canteen, an institution that by local tradition hosts a meal for all comers every five days; after each, the elders judge you on the quality of the fare you’ve been able to provide and adjust your stipend accordingly, with your performance over the game’s probationary thirty-day period determining whether you’re offered a permanent position. Fortunately, you’ve got assets including a regular infusion of tax revenue, a bat-spirit named Merry-Andrew, and the kind of indefatigable spirit that leads attractive villagers of all gender identities to want to get close to you by revealing their mildly-dramatic backstories to you one pseudo-date at a time.

OK, I’m kidding again, but really, the game implements its recognizable formula faithfully and well. The mechanics are rich enough to stay engaging over six iterations of the socialize-prepare-feast cycle, without being overwhelming. Each day you have four actions, one of which will almost always be to knock together some snacks you can sell in the marketplace to supplement your stipend; the rest can be used to spend time with one of the three primary friends/love interests, go foraging in the outskirts, harvest herbs from your garden, or lend a hand to other villagers in the hopes of getting a reward. Other actions, notably shopping for ingredients and new cookbooks, don’t take any time but do require money. And the game does a good job of feeding its various systems into the set-piece feasts: build enough affection with the busker Orlando and they’ll offer to play fiddle at one of your meals, increasing the number of stars the elders will award you, and helping Merry-Andrew with a series of tasks he’s struggling with will also build your standing with the village as a whole, which is what you’re ultimately judged on.

The cooking is of course the centerpiece of gameplay. You start out with a few cookbooks, each containing a half dozen or so main courses and side dishes requiring perhaps one or two common ingredients, rated in quality from average to deluxe. You also have another book that provides some broad hints about how to approach the feasts: making sure the three dishes you offer are from the same culture might boost your rating, for example, as will sticking to the classic main plus side plus dessert structure. There are many more cookbooks you can buy, and a few additional ingredients you can unlock through various means, meaning I was never short of new recipes to try, even as I felt perpetually short of time and cash until I hit the last few days of the month. And in general fancier dishes take more and/or rarer ingredients, but will give you more stars at the feast, which in turn gives you more resources for the next go-round, which makes for a pleasing progression.

The food itself, happily for me, is almost entirely vegetarian (I think there are like two fish dishes?) It also ranges across an enticing variety of origins, though the constraints of gameplay inevitably lead to some questionable choices (naan is only “average”? Fight me). It’s well-described too, and in fact the prose is solid throughout the game; this isn’t the kind of story that ever indulges in stylistic flourishes, but it rarely puts a foot wrong. Here’s a bit of dialogue from Antonia, a painter who went to the big city to make it big but who’s since come back:

“I don’t know if I’d call it home,” she says, shoving her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat. “I’ve always thought of myself as a city girl, really. Hardly know what possessed me to come back here of all places. Fancied it would be a good place to paint, I suppose.”

She lapses into silence, and you let it string out. You have the sense that Antonia is more likely to speak if you leave space for it, rather than prompting her.

“It hasn’t even been that,” she says after a moment. “Nothing I do comes out right. I’m not a landscape artist, not really. I’ve always painted people. But change is supposed to be good, isn’t it? Refreshing. I mean, why did you decide to come here? To do this job?”

For all that the text is earnest to the point of being po-faced, though, there are some sly touches here and there – did I mention that the character who uses they/them pronouns is named Orlando? And among the want-ads on the notice-board is tucked this gem: “for sale: adult shoes, worn a bit.”

While the interface does provide almost all the information you need to plan meals and decide how to balance all the different objectives you can pursue, there are a few places where I felt a bit at sea. For example I was never able to get that same-culture bonus despite trying to cluster all the Asian-origin dishes together; this is especially awkward since Eikas is set in a fantasy world so I was never sure if, like, India existed, or just onion bhajis and carrot halwa. Beyond that, I never fully sussed out what advantages you gain from fulfilling requests on the notice-board, or why you’d want to replace one of your three precious feast dishes with a sauce. And there’s a sequence where you have to collect three different objects for Merry-Andrew, but searching for each takes an action and relies on a random die-roll to determine whether you succeed or fail, which I found an irresistible temptation to save-scumming.

I probably didn’t need to have bothered, though – I finished the game with hundreds of unneeded coins in the bank, with the strongest-possible affection with all the named characters, and four or five more stars than I needed to max out the village’s approval. Just as in Eikas’ fiction, nothing can ever really go wrong, the mechanics are also tuned to provide a gentle, cozy experience. I can understand an objection to this on an aesthetic level – if you thrive on stories of drama and conflict, there are only slim pickings here – but if the objective was to provide a bit of low-stakes feel-good solace, as in yes, Stardew Valley, Eikas more than achieves the brief.