Cursed? Healthy? Fancy? Which dish will you make?
After a difficult breakup, and a long night of drinking, you decide to take your life back and put things back in order. Starting with a simple meal. Treat yourself!
In this cooking adventure, you play as someone getting over a bad breakup. Drinking hasn't helped. You need to make and eat a decent meal. Do you want to make deluxe toast, cursed pizza, or fancy noodles?
The game includes mentions and/or depictions of the following: alcoholism, depression, fights, bad eating habits, (bad) food.
Not Another Sad Meal is a short slice-of-life cooking simulator in a parser format, made in Adventuron for the Recipe Jam and the SeedComp!. You play as a depressed person going through a breakup, forcing themselves to make a meal. There are 3 distinct recipe to complete.
Obviously inspired by my love of food and cooking, this game helped me experiment with manipulation puzzles for parsers, specifically containers, and alternative paths to ending. This was more difficult than I imagined, as Adventuron does not really support world modelling. I had to do some coding trickery to keep it playable (still not as seamless as I would want it).
To ensure the game was still accessible to all levels of players, the game includes an in-game and downloadable walkthrough, with all the required steps to complete each of the recipes. As well, the objects are not only highlighted to indicate they can be interacted with, but also tricker an action when clicked on.
Finally, the actual recipes for the three meals are available for download on itch.io.
IFDB Award
Key & Compass
Loved the details. I played again to find hidden messages in red herrings. It’s very engaging.✨ Cooking can be really a form of self—healing.
- zeno pillan