Soup Pot Wants To Spark Your Culinary Creativity
You will surely ask: “Another cooking game? Who needs something like that?” and given the multitude of games about food preparation out there, this reaction is not exactly surprising. Yet, you should keep an eye on Soup Pot because the international slash Philippine collective Chikon Club has something extraordinary in development… um … I mean in the oven for you.
Although cooking can be a creative process, many cooking games focus solely on working through lists of ingredients accurately. If you don’t stick to the recipe, you lose. Soup Pot, on the other hand, wants to reward creativity in cooking. There are supposed to be more than 100 recipes to choose from, but they shouldn’t bind the players and instead encouraged them to experiment and create variations. That sounds refreshing, fits the zeitgeist of current indie developments and could also appeal to players who have not had anything to do with cooking before.
Gameplay-wise, the recently published trailer gives a pretty lively impression. From the first-person perspective, we prepare ingredients accurately and cook everything in our cosy and down-to-earth kitchen space. We look up recipes on the in-game social media platform Cookbook, where we can also share our new creations. With all of this, Soup Pot doesn’t take itself too seriously. Instead of a hyper-realistic cooking simulator, a playful cooking sandbox awaits us, in which the ingredients rock along to the music and call their names before they go into the pot. Wonderfully weird and somehow pretty sweet, …. or salty, or bitter, or whatever taste you prefer.
And just look at how beautiful the food and ingredients are designed in Soup Pot! The 3D renders appear stylised, but you still want to take a bite straight away because they just look so realistic and tasty. No comparison to the often uninspired 2D drawings of other genre representatives. The fact that the ingredients, dishes, and recipes find their origin in Southeast Asia’s culinary cultures is a particularly commendable extra.
Soup Pot is scheduled to be released for Xbox Series X / S and Steam in August 2021. I do not doubt that Chikon Club will achieve the intended goal. On the one hand, they have already released a delightfully fun “predecessor” game with Putahe ng Ina Mo: Sinigang Edition, which proves their knack for stylish cooking games. On the other hand, the team around veteran Philippine game maker Gwen Foster and the talented Trina Francesca Pagtakhan has enough experience and creative potential on board to make it happen. Players can look forward to a light-hearted cooking game that aims to serve the fun of cooking Southeast Asian cuisine as a mouth-watering menu. Kain na!
