As Anthony Bourdain once said, “Food is everything we are.” A good meal is a gateway into a place’s history, an indispensable element of culture that can bring people together. Dosa Divas, the latest from Outerloop Games (Thirsty Suitors), embodies this idea; the upcoming turn-based RPG combines cooking and beatdowns as it lambasts one of the biggest mistakes from the startup culture era: “meal replacement” products like Soylent.
The story follows a pair of estranged sisters, Samara and Amani, who used to run a restaurant together before an accident caused Amani to disappear for a decade. Now, after all this time, she’s finally back, reuniting with her sibling and their spirit mech, Goddess, as the trio set off on a journey to visit mom and dad. But in the time Amani has been away, things have changed. Their other sister, Nina, has created an evil corporation that crushes local cultures and cuisine, banning home-cooking while peddling a sad food replacement. The hour-long preview we played followed Samara and Amani as they defended a local village from encroaching fast-food goons.
Given all the culinary framing, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the act of cooking is central to Dosa Divas. The first community that these two come across has been under Nina’s thumb for so long that they barely remember what a handmade meal tastes like, and to encourage the town’s hungry workers, you’ll have to make them food. First, you’ll assemble ingredients that can be found throughout the world, with each component added to the dish introducing different effects, like increased healing or a temporary damage buff.
Then comes the actual preparation, which is done through minigames: one has you spinning the control stick to match a specific pace, while another involves button-mashing at set intervals. The better you do at these, the more food you make, letting you maximize ingredients if you’re careful. Although straightforward, these segments were tactile and varied enough to keep things entertaining for the length of the demo, and their brevity felt right given how often you’ll be returning to the grill to satisfy orders. The big question is whether these tasks will wear thin over the course of the game—there were quite a few repeats already in the hour we played—but hopefully, more will be introduced alongside new food types. On top of letting you cook up consumables for your party, prepping these meals will also improve your standing with the communities you visit, giving access to new moves during battles.
As for how these fights play out, while these RPG systems feel familiar at first, they come with some very clever toppings. When it comes to the recognizable, each of your three party members has their own standard attack, skill moves that eat up a mana equivalent, stats that determine their damage and defense, and so on. There are also plenty of Mario RPG-inspired elements: On offense, a well-timed button press triggers follow-up attacks, and on defense, you can block to minimize or negate damage altogether. If that sounds a bit too close to other recent games in this style (like Clair Obscur, for instance), the good news is that combat has its own cooking-centric ideas.
Each move has a specific flavor—sweet, salty, and so on—which functions like elemental affinities in other games. If a given move is effective against an enemy’s palate, then each individual hit will get them closer to becoming “stuffed,” at which point they’ll be stunned and take more damage. Pulling this off is the key to battles, and it adds a strategic layer that keeps you from just mashing your strongest move: an enemy’s “stuffed counter” increases based on the number of times they’re hit, and isn’t connected to damage, so a multi-hit move is more filling than a single powerful blow.
For instance, Samara, the party’s front-line damage dealer, has a special attack where she chucks her wok like it’s Captain America’s shield, repeatedly bouncing it off her foe until the player mistimes an input. If her adversary has a hankering for spicy food, it will build their stuffed meter each time the wok connects, making this an ideal way to incapacitate them. Meanwhile, Amani has an energy blast skill that only hits once, but deals a ton of damage, making it a perfect follow-up after Samara puts the opponent in a food coma. Taken as a whole, these nuances give these scuffles with corpos a nice kick.
If it wasn’t clear from the constant run-ins with out-of-towner company men, Dosa Divas seems to have a lot to say about gentrifying tech companies. As these cronies get their just deserts, they tend to croak out a barb or two about how the sisters and the villagers they’re protecting are “hicks” because they don’t want their main source of sustenance to be paste from a tube. Beyond the food angle, Nina’s company is trying to replace existing culture with a consumerist nightmare, bombarding passersby with ads as she expands her enterprise through “exclusivity” deals that basically give her the rights to these people’s land.
It’s an interesting touch that she’s a blood relative of our protagonists, and it’s clear that family drama will be as essential to the game as its central anti-corporate crusade. These events feel quite personal, a sentiment heightened by naturalistic dialogue and convincing performances that accentuate the type of long-building tensions unique to relatives. In this way, Dosa Divas seems to have some real meat to it, and, between a colorful art style and food-based flourishes, it seems to be bringing enough of its own ideas to the table. All things considered, this first taste did not disappoint.
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