Eikas by Lauren O'Donoghue

Competitions IFComp
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Eikas is a cooking sim (ingredient acquisition and menu-planning sim?) threaded through a story about growing into a new community. You’re at a new job and new home, on a 30-day trial as Community Chef in a small village, tasked with producing a community meal every 5-day week-analogue (and, in practice, supplementing the inadequate funding, but hey, sell food to fund giving food away, it’s all community-building).

It drops a lot on you right up front: four major actions and whatever amount of looking around per day, explore the village, read the recipes, puzzle out which ingredients you can afford and how to piece them together, have a meal figured out in five days. And it takes a while to get going: I was about 10 of the 30 game-days in (and nearly half-way to the 2-hour playtime mark) before I felt like I was finding my feet and starting to care about the story.

But the back half pays it off reasonably well, I think. You get quicker at navigating through the chores, more comfortable with the basic mechanics and able to have fun thinking a little bigger-picture meal planning, and the storylines start to come into their own. I enjoyed all three of the major NPCs. ROs? This is more the hint of romance than an actual dating sim, but it’s structured kinda like one.

As with all of these simulationist hypertext games, it’s pretty clicky. Enough to have my programmer-brain going “yeah, personally I’d shave off one click over here, and two over here, and another one over there, and boy would that add up…” but really no worse than any other similar games, and better than some.

I liked this one. A little slow/overwhelming to start, but hang in there.

Grr... I want to say 'go play Ataraxia instead,' except not really

This is very structurally similar to the author’s previous game Ataraxia and personally I prefer that? It doesn’t have the cooking, which… I like the cooking (and I’m pretty sure there’s a bunch of little invisible scoring stuff going into the reception of your menu, which feels cool regardless of whether it has a major impact) but not having cooking leaves Ataraxia free to start off with more story and build the mechanics gradually (I think: it’s been a couple years).

And Eikas is more cozy mundane fantasy, and very light on the fantasy: apart from the presence of Mauthe the fantasy is almost entirely confined to the town notice board and never lives up to the promise of a village where people post things like “Free bookshelf. It got loose last night and we can’t find it anywhere.” Dangit, I want more of that in my cozy cooking game.

Whereas Ataraxia is explicitly mysterious folk horror (light horror, I’d say? Mostly off screen? But it’s threaded through everywhere). And the world there feels more… present: Eikas feels more like an assemblage of random events. Some of which are lovely and some of which are… look, if villagers drop vegetables in the community kitchen donation box and one of the descriptions of the vegetable’s condition is as memorable as “There’s a loose tissue and an apple core too. Did they think this was a bin?” that needs to be extremely rare. Great as a one-off, less great if you see it 3-5 times in a couple hours.

Anyway. Eikas is a good game in its own right: I don’t want to distract you from that… but I have a clear preference, so put the other on your list for later, huh?

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I really enjoyed this game and based on your comments, I need to check out Ataraxia! Interesting what you said about pacing/feeling overwhelmed at the beginning but hitting a groove at the end- I actually felt just the opposite, haha. I’ll copy my review from my IFComp thread below:

Chloe's Review

‘Eikas’, a communal feast celebration help in honor of the Epicurean philosophy, lends its name to this perfectly charming and captivating slice-of-life game. You play as the new chef of a communal food hall in a fantasy village; the setting reminds me of Studio Ghibli films. Your assistant is a magical bat creature. With his help, you need to plan and serve multiple village feasts over the course of a month while the village council decides whether to keep you on for the long term.

This is an RPG-style cooking simulator with a REALLY impressive amount of depth. Every single recipe you can cook (and there are a LOT) has its own little blurb, and it makes the food sound delicious! You can visit multiple locations in the town, buy or forage ingredients, decorate the food hall by growing flowers, do mini quests from a message board, read books with background lore, and more. None of the individual game systems are particularly complex, but taken as a whole, this is an RPG with impressive depth that encourages you to slow down and take note of the little things- the beautiful descriptions of nature, the quirky sense of humor. The implementation is fantastic as well, with a number of helpful features for helping the player keep track of what they’re doing and what ingredients they have. There’s even a notepad feature that I really loved, and used a lot to plan out my meals. During my experience playing the game, I never encountered any glitches or typos either, which speaks to an impressive amount of polish and playtesting.

My favorite part is that you can befriend a handful of NPCs who are all impressively well-sketched characters. It’s hard to decide which one is my favorite, but all of them feel like complex, dynamic people with their own worldviews, hopes and dreams, and favorite meals. When the historian opened up about his background, I’ll admit I got pretty misty-eyed. If this game were much, much longer, I would relish the opportunity to spend more time with these lovable characters, especially the aforementioned bat creature!

My only complaints are the difficulty and the achievement system. While a gentle pastoral fantasy doesn’t need to be difficult, I found it a bit TOO easy to finish each character’s storyline, max out my approval in town, cook four-star meals, buy every book, and so on. By the last ten or so days, I had completed every side story and had enough money to buy all the ingredients I needed, so I just sort of clicked around to fill time until the day ended. The pacing was great early in the game when I had a bunch of different quests, but by the end it had slowed down a lot. If there were a bit more time pressure or trade-off with the decisions you make, I think it could add some more excitement to what should be a particularly tense last few days.

Also, I wish that you could see your achievements once you reach the ending screen! Possibly also with a list of all the possible achievements, to encourage the player to try again and unlock them all.

Overall, I had a lovely time playing Eikas and have already recommended it to some friends. This game feels like eating my dad’s famous chicken soup with matzo balls on a cold winter day… nourishing and heartwarming.

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Ah, yeah, once you finish all the storylines it gets flat.

There was one little typo in the first release (the wording asked you for the “first” dish again when you were actually choosing the third/final one) and …uh… I got very confused and cooked some strange and expensive meals the first two times and that set me behind on the money a fair bit. So I wasn’t as far ahead as you were: I only had one or two slow days at the end and it felt like a nice relaxing close.

Interesting. I guess usually these kinds of games are balanced so you have to play multiple times to see everything, but then you know nobody will run out of story?

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This is a very good game, but count me as someone else who was slightly underwhelmed due to the comparison with Ataraxia. The addition of a time limit and more immediate stakes do add more depth to the gameplay (and I had the same experience as Josh where I went from struggling at first to finding my footing, which I thought did a good job of reflecting the main character’s experience as a newcomer). But on the whole there was less to do, and I found the characters slightly less compelling, and the sense of place not quite as strong.

That said, “not quite as good as Ataraxia” is hardly a scathing criticism. I highly recommend this game (and also Ataraxia).

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Thanks so much to everyone who has played and reviewed so far!

Eikas definitely felt like a bit of a ‘difficult second album’ after Ataraxia - developing Ataraxia was kind of a wild experience, I don’t think I’ve ever had an idea come to me so fully-formed or written anything so quickly - and this was much more of a learning curve, especially trying to balance the difficulty.

It’s always been my intention to make a sort of spiritual sequel to Ataraxia one day and I’m hoping to take a lot of the things I’ve learned from making Eikas (and will hopefully continue to learn as more reviews come in) through to that when it happens!

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I wrote a review here:

I haven’t played Ataraxia before, but I’ve had it on my to-play list for a while, so I guess I’ll have to check it out!

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I really enjoyed Eikas, despite doing poorly in it. The writing was lovely and the exploration of the world was very enjoyable. The relationship with Merry-Andrew was great and I did everything he asked me to, at the expense of making other friends, which hurt me, I think.

I always feel scattered in optimization games like this, unable to make a plan and stick to it, and so I never made a meal rated above 2 stars. And this is generally why I dislike optimization games, but I did like this one. I was engaged and trying for the entire game and I came away feeling fulfilled despite not getting the job. I might actually play this again at a later date to see if I can do better. I recommend giving this a whirl!

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Thank you for the review! I’m so glad you enjoyed it.

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Just finished this one and had a lot of fun! I loved the progression of newcomer knowing no one to being part of the community. I also liked the coziness of the setting and quite enjoyed all the NPCs’ stories, and the casual queerness was a lovely bonus. I did neglect my meal-planning a bit at first in favor of the social aspects haha, but I hit 4 stars on a meal eventually! (Just once, though. I messed up my last meal by accidentally using up several of my intended ingredients on a notice board request. :sweat_smile: But I did get hired!)

I found the sheer number of recipes I could make by the end (having bought all the books) a bit overwhelming, and largely ignored some categories (sorry, salad- and sauce-lovers!). I also was a little confused on the theming; I tried making chow mein, fried rice, and ramen together, but didn’t get a theme bonus for that. My only other real friction point was that I didn’t learn how to get berries until over halfway through, and my third noticeboard request was for a berry pie, so I was stuck sitting on that one for a while.

But these are minor complaints about what was overall a charming, pleasant, and well-made game! Very much looking forward to checking out Ataraxia now. :eyes:

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Thank you Tabitha, I’m glad you enjoyed it!

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cross-posting my separate review here

One thing I didn’t discuss there, because I wasn’t really sure what to make of it, but I’m curious what others thought about the choice to leave the biome / region of the setting pretty vague. (Or did it ping others and being set in a specific place?) The foraging we see (mushrooms, fish, berries) is available in a lot of places. I do recall there being a lot of birds mentioned in the place descriptions, although I didn’t look them up or anything. On the one hand, it made it largerly relatable, and we’re in a fantasy place anyway. On the other hand, one interesting thing about food is how cuisines develop around local ingredients.

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The main thing I noticed about the available ingredients was the lack of potatoes! So… I guess it’s set somewhere where potatoes don’t grow? :joy:

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Did you notice it was also largely vegetarian/pescatarian?

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As a vegan, I certainly did! And appreciated that. :sparkling_heart:

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Chiming in here just because I think it’s kind of funny - all of the recipes in the game were the ones I drafted up for the initial test model, when I was basically going ‘okay here’s a set of ingredients, what recognisable meals could I use these to make’?

I was conscious at the time that a lot of them referenced real-world cuisines (Greek Salad being the most egregious example, given that this is a fantasy world and Greece doesn’t exist there) and sort of had a vague idea that I would eventually make the recipe names more generic, but then my beta testers were REALLY keen for me to add combo bonuses and as I was time-pressed the regional cuisine groupings seemed the most obvious way to do that. At this point I’d sort of designed myself into a corner and didn’t have time to write my way out of it before the deadline.

So, offering a peek behind the veil here, I’m just as conscious of the flaws in logic as the rest of you! I hope that the necessary suspension of disbelief didn’t damage your enjoyment too much.

As for the biome, while the locations here are all fictional, the setting was very heavily inspired by the Elan Valley in Wales! I’d just come back from a holiday in Ceredigion when I started writing the game so it was fresh in my mind.

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I haven’t played Ataraxia yet (though I will once IFComp is done!), so no comparisons here.

For me, the balance of Eikas was on point. I was able to pretty steadily increase my meal ratings (2-3-2-3-4-4) and wrapped up all the subplots by the beginning of the last “week,” giving me some breathing room to plan for the final meal. I appreciated the amount of detail that went into the game and the different ways that you could bond with the community outside the big meals.

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Thank you so much! I’m really glad you enjoyed it

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