itch.io

It's been nearly a year since my grandmother, who raised me, passed away, and I've been working on trying to transcribe her recipes onto my computer. I found this game and started playing by sheer coincidence. I didn't know about the grieving aspect of the plot, so it kind of hit me unexpectedly with heaviness. Of course, I did really like the game. A lot was funnily on the nose.  I recall at one point I was making one of my grandmother's recipes and it didn't turn out right. I got really angry and people were telling me that it still tastes fine. They didn't understand why it set me off so much. I childishly kept yelling about how I wasn't going to ever be able to make it right and how it was "gone forever now."  Really I felt guilty about not having cooked with her more often or not having paid enough attention, not acquiring enough information while she was here, not being able to do it like she did, so I thought it was interesting how a lot of Mei's dialogue sort of mirrored that as well. I think this game did a good job with using food/recipes to symbolically represent the stories, information, and memories shared with a loved one, and with the past as a whole. Coincidentally we also had a mother's day gift for when she returned from the hospital that she never got to receive, having died on mother's day, so that part also unexpectedly got a lot heavy for me when I played.
Overall I hadn't set out to play a particularly emotional game, but I ended up liking this game quite a bit. If you'd excuse the sappiness, I never really had allowed myself to process my grandmother's death and reflect on it, and this game provided a bit of that, so I'm glad I got to play it.