Wolfbiter reviews IFComp 2024 - latest: Eikas; wrap-up

Eikas by Lauren O’Donoghue
Playtime: 1 hour 35 minutes

The one where: we run a cozy community kitchen

Wow, this game really sucked me in. “I’ll just play the opening,” I thought. “Oh, let me put together one dinner.” Well, 1 hour 35 minutes later . . .

So, one confession is that I was playing with an unshakable confidence that I was not going to be fired. Perhaps I was gloriously deluding myself—I saw some reviewers who thought there was a pass/fail cut-off—but it was what it was.

This is not to say I was serving sloppy meals. But it does mean I was assembling meals based on my own exacting but idiosyncratic standards, and pretty much ignored the game’s hints about how to maximize your score. (Which, I mean, the origin bonus is mildly puzzling. *I* know mujaddara has origins in the Levant, etc. but I don’t think there’s an in-game source of this knowledge? I assume because it’s awkward for the recipe game to state that chow mein is from China, thus implying China exists in-game? which I am now thinking about anyway . . . )

I’m a big fan of the concept of a game themed around meals and community building. I wish this system existed where I lived! And there was enough background criticism of the council etc. that it didn’t feel too fantastical.

The core game mechanic of preparing meals is abstracted in a way that’s pretty forgiving (food keeps forever, planting seeds takes zero time, a lot of actions [selling snacks] also take no time). But, it still felt plenty engaging, perhaps because it required resource management and spreading out chains of actions across multiple in-game days. It was tuned pretty easy (I think at the beginning you could serve a dinner without buying anything, there seems to be time to “max out” all of your relationships and serve good meals). I don’t think this is a problem, but on the last day or so I started running out of things to do with all of my slots, so it might have been nice to have a few more unnecessary-but-interesting bonus locations. (Although it did take me until the last meal to have all 3 of my friends come present.)

The relationships with the NPCs were satisfying. They each had not-easily-resolvable emotional issues which they nonetheless made progress on. I liked their general arcs, but wouldn’t have minded if the progression was even a bit slower (sometimes it seemed they were finding insight too quickly). And I liked how each eventually unlocked a new foraged food.

I’m not sure if I had a romance with an NPC or not. I wouldn’t have minded a bit more foreshadowing / development about that, I had gotten purely platonic vibes from all of them so that line at the end was sort of a shock.

One NPC-related note I wouldn’t have minded seeing that wasn’t present was an answer to the question of what happened to the last chef. How do people in the community feel about them?

The writing was enjoyable / unobtrusive:

I saw a few repeats in the “help” sequences but not very many (and I was doing at least one a day). The cooking-themed romance novel excerpt was also funny.

The UI had some great background colors, and I liked the way that actions which consumed time were clearly marked (and also the remaining time was clearly marked). Navigating required a lot of clicking—I think ideally there might have been a permanently visible bar allowing you to go with one-click to the greengrocer, the main village square, etc.

And this is very much not needed, but a really superlative feature would have been like a grocery list you could add recipes to and see what you still needed. I ended up making a spreadsheet so I could keep track of my shopping, especially for the first few meals where money was tighter. On a similar note, ideally the feats would still be viewable after you finish the game.

Somehow I failed to ever complete a quest from the noticeboard? I looked and saw one, and it kept telling me I didn’t have the ingredients yet, and that persisted until the game was over. (In hindsight I guess I should have started buying extra ingredients from the market to see if I could find the mystery one? But I was confused because the quest text suggest the key ingredient was garlic, which we have in unlimited amounts, so no leads on what other ingredient it might have been.).

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game Successfully sets the table for the game Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

I thought the blurb was really well done! I kind of expected the title to be explained at some point in the game though, which it was not.

Overall, a highly engaging and soothing chef simulator

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