Eikas by Lauren O’Donoghue
I wasn’t too into the other cottagecore game in this competition, but Eikas worked better for me. I think there were two reasons for that. First, Eikas is more interested in telling a coherent story with developing characters and relationships. Second, it gave me a serious challenge to sink my teeth into: become the best possible community chef! Or at least the good-enough community chef.
So I started exploring the game world. It seemed fairly obvious that I should make snacks every day to maximise income; in a dig at the effectiveness of charitable giving, the much-touted gift box never gives you more than a pittance and usually not even that. I used the first money to buy all the seeds available, because that made economic sense. (And if only I had realised that ‘roses 3/3’ did not mean that I had already decorated the room, I would have had a nice first community dinner. But I didn’t, and only later on realised that you had to click that link in order to make decoration happen.) It was a bit repetitive, a bit like grinding, but it was okay, and it also wasn’t long before I had been able to buy all the cookbooks.
And I had enough time to explore the world and meet the characters. This is actually the most interesting part of the game, the four storylines that anchor you to real people in the game world. They also tie into the cooking: each of the three main NPCs has a favourite meal you can make for them, and each of them teaches you to forage for one special ingredient needed for a extra high quality dish. This is all well-done, with nice characters and good writing. If I have a complaint, it is that things started to feel mechanical after a while. Each relationship develops in the exact same way, going through the exact same beats with the exact same challenges and rewards. It would have been nice to switch things up a bit, because now the characters turned into game mechanics. (“When is he going to teach me to fish?” I was wondering, days before fictional me learned that the guy liked fishing. “What gift will he give me to put in my bedroom?”)
My other complaint is… yeah, I guess I’m just going to complain about cottage core again. The complaint is that there is no friction. I meet these people, and all of them are transformed in a good way by being with me for a month. I make food, and the community comes together. There’s no dramatic tension. The game tries to generate tension through the star system and the idea that I’m only on probation; and early on this works; but it quickly turns out to be so easy that the last ten days you are just biding your time until you’ve reached the end, all the relationships already at full stars, your pantry fully stocked, and your confirmation as community chef a foregone conclusion. Emotionally, I wasn’t really invested in any of it, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I’m in a world where all trouble is in the past, and none of it is the present, let alone in the future.
That said, this was a fun game, and easy to recommend for people who want something light but substantial. I wonder what meal that corresponds to?