Cooking is one of life’s greatest pleasures. It’s a delight to all the senses—the sizzle of oil in a hot pan, the crisp chop of an onion, the savory fragrance of roasting garlic. It’s a wonderful thing to create something greater than the sum of its parts, to nourish yourself and the people you care about. From the first dice to the final bite, cooking is an act of love.
Dosa Divas is a cooking game, sort of. Equal parts vibrant and violent, Dosa Divas is a turn-based role-playing game that’s home to ancient, sentient mechs and a tyrannical corporation that has made cooking illegal, replacing food with tubed sludge called LinaMeals. You play as sisters Samara and Amani and their mech, Goddess, as they journey to reunite with their estranged parents and younger sister for one last dinner as a family. Unfortunately, in its pursuit of a grand narrative of spiritual beings, evil corporations, and the unbreakable bond of family, Dosa Divas fails in mechanical and emotional depth, flattening its many ambitious themes into discordance.
Samara, Amani, and Goddess travel through once-lively villages now subjugated by the sinister Lina Corporation, gathering ingredients and cooking dosas for themselves and the local villagers. On their journey, they battle many allies of LinaCorp, from nameless goons to former friends burdened with tragic backstories. These two concepts—collecting resources to serve restorative meals, and airing out interpersonal conflict through mech combat—are both done in half measures and never fully reconciled in the game.
The villagers who haven’t eaten real meals in who knows how long have specific orders that you must fulfill, despite some of them not knowing food could even take a solid shape. Preparing their meals takes the form of arranging your ingredients into predetermined recipes, repeating the same monotonous minigames, and literally checking meals off a to-do list. You have to serve a certain number of interchangeable villagers in order to progress the main story, and then afterwards can choose to keep feeding more people—usually people who you just fed, like, a minute ago—to max out your relationship with the region and get optional upgrade parts for Goddess. Here cooking is less a creative act of love than a rigid transactional chore.
The combat is also a drag. You face the same handful of region-based enemies so often that the quick-time events to block their repetitive attacks become muscle memory rather than an interesting challenge. Dosa Divas has an interesting Stuffing mechanic, where each party member has attacks that inflict different food properties, such as Savory, Sour, Sweet, etc. Stacking a certain combination of properties onto an opponent will disable their attacks before their health fully depletes, but the combat never becomes challenging enough to force the player to engage with the potential depth of its systems. For instance, each party member can either perform a Physical or Spiritual attack on their turn, and while the Spiritual Attack uses up a meter of Spirit Points, that meter almost never empties or even runs low—not even in battles where Spiritual attacks are used exclusively. The party also fully restores its Health and Spirit Power in between battles, defanging any sense of danger that could have helped invest the player in the game’s central conflict or made room for strategizing. While tyranny supposedly crushes the world around them, Samara, Amani, and Goddess simply float above it all. The villagers live in constant terror, wholly dependent on LinaMeals to survive, but our party easily dispatches the cops and employees attempting to punish them for cooking illegally. It’s like if Footloose had no stakes.
The immense violence of Dosa Divas’ systems is at odds with the game’s cheerfulness. There is an irreconcilable dissonance between the exhausting, miserable lives of LinaCorp laborers and the carefree attitude of our protagonists. Perhaps because it’s all a family affair: The corporation that strictly enforces 16-hour work days and child labor, murders employees by withholding medical treatment, and conducts mass surveillance through a network of micro-managers, is helmed by Samara and Amani’s little sister, Lina. To Samara and Amani, LinaCorp is just a nuisance—a string of propaganda posters to shred and billboards to destroy. Sure, Samara and Amani get upset over how their sister treats the locals, but the ease with which our party defies the laws constricting everyone around them reduces the tyranny of LinaCorp to little more than its irritating jingle. To the player it’s just background noise.
Dosa Divas spends its entire duration struggling with the very crux of cooking and, yes, combat: human connection. The game relies on familial bonds as shorthands for realistic relationships—Samara and Amani are sisters, so it’s presumed that they love each other without the game ever giving them anything substantial to bond over. Their parents are two of the most forgetful and callous characters in games, guiltlessly abandoning the responsibility of caring for any of their daughters, yet their daughters only ever regard them with toothless frustration, and ultimately forgive them without the player getting to see the internal process of that forgiveness. The relationship dynamics read more like two-dimensional story beats than relatable human experiences.
Dosa Divas gestures at thorny emotional topics like betrayal and forgiveness, but never grants its characters the emotional depth to meaningfully engage with these subjects. It’s a game of interesting ideas without commitment, too afraid to rise to the challenge of genuine conflict and, consequently, genuine love.
Dosa Divas was developed and published by Outerloop Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for PlayStation 5, Switch, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X/S.
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