October Next Fest, Day 5
Cook for Me, INSECT. I AM SHODAN-CHAN.
A NOTICE: I am traveling, and therefore limited to playing [and recording] on my Steam Deck, which is an impressive little machine, but, uh, not flawless. Any issues I mention with performance or graphics should be considered in that context, which isn’t to say they aren’t problems, but that they are problems that might not exist on a full rig. Also I mostly fixed the resolution problems from Day 0, but not entirely. You’re just gonna have to deal with it, I’m tired.
Verho – Curse of Faces
The truest King’s Field clone I’ve played since Lunacid. The look and feel of the PSX King’s Field games by FromSoft have had a bit of a moment in the sun lately – it might well be the hacky aesthetic du jour, even if I’ve liked a few of the games appropriating it. But Verho is attempting to be King’s Field almost from top to bottom, with King’s Field style enemies, King’s Field style items and spells and faceless NPCs, pretty much the only thing it tries differently are the controls. Unlike KF, or indeed most FromSoft or FromSoft-inspired games, you have a real jump button, and are expected to do a bit of mild platforming to explore the maps thoroughly.
Thank you, Miyazaki~
The demo has two options – you can start a new character from the beginning and experience the tutorial and early game, or you can start a Next Fest run with a moderately advanced character in a big hub area and some equipment. I first made a Next Fest character, picking the magic-using Scholar, and explored the swamp zone a bit. There are a glut of weapons and items to find in this map, probably more than there would be in the full game, but you can still get enough of a feel for the weapon types and spell casting. After a death I started over on a fresh Scholar to check out the intro, which includes an almost laughably incoherent plot about people’s heads spontaneously exploding.
There’s a lot to like here. The pacing and tone are somewhere between authentic King’s Field and incoherent Lunacid, the slightly more modernized controls are a welcome concession to the passage of time, and the fully voiced dialogue is amateur but not unlistenable. Spellcasting seems powerful but restricted, meaning it hopefully will not be relegated to spamming projectiles or overpowered instakills, and I liked that you go into a free auto-sprint when sheathing your weapons rather than needing to hold down a button and manage a stamina bar.
Balance might not be all there, though – I don’t really know how I would beat the one boss I encountered, despite learning you can jump over certain attacks Elden Ring style, and I noticed that destructible barrels and crates respawn along with their contents when you rest at a bonfire-I mean mask statue, so you can technically trivially grind up hundreds of gold and health potions off the dozens that surround the save point in the Next Fest location.
I didn’t play this demo very thoroughly, and I don’t think I’m going to, because after an hour or so I realized I’d be getting the full game when it comes out and don’t really want to spoil myself any further. I’m a bit curious how much you can do in the demo, considering it has two starting points, but that’s for someone with more time to investigate.
FlippUp
Pinball adventure game… maybe in the vein of Pinball Spire, where you progress up through a branching map of pinball boards. But I’ll never fucking know because the paddles are SO weak I literally couldn’t get off the first screen to see anything else the game did. I spent like five minutes and cycled through all three control schemes thinking maybe it was something wrong with my controller. Nope! The paddles are just so limp-dicked that they can barely heft the ball into an arc high enough to reach the other side, much less launch it to a new area. You’d think if you were making a pinball game you’d at least make the paddles work properly, but then again I already played a 3D platformer this event that didn’t have character shadows.
Cook for Me Grandpa!
The past few months have seen game developers join every other shitty executive and manager in touting the incredible and unprecedented potential of feeding every creative exercise into a glorified chatbot and taking whatever it spits out as a finished product. But among all the moronic Boomerthoughts about AI that reinterprets your controller input to help you play better and AI generating each individual frame of an ephemeral and ever-shifting dreamscape on the fly, there have been a few mentions of actual legitimate use cases for generative models. Can AI, for example, do something human writers can’t, and flesh out hundreds or thousands of NPCs with dialogue that is properly reactive, relevant, and more than a digital form letter or answering machine message? And is there really a point to bothering with this?
Cook for Me Grandpa! feels like an attempt to present the best possible excuse to use AI models in gameplay, and it’s surprisingly clever. You play as a Japanese widower who is struggling to adapt to living alone, comforted by weekly dinners with your daughter and two grand-children. When your daughter chides you for your meal choices and suggests you should eat better and try cooking for yourself [something your wife had always handled] you go on an epic quest to learn the Secret Techniques of the Chefs of the Four Realms, hone your skills, grind up epic ingredients and seasonings, and wow your grandkids with a half-decent stir fry.
The game operates a bit like a time-management game, with you having the option of going out to one place each day of the week in preparation for the big weekend challenge. I guess as a retiree you only really have energy to hit one store each day, [relatable] so meal planning requires some thought and preparation [plus budget considerations] as different stores handle meat, veggies, seasonings, and seafood. You also have the option to attend a paid cooking class run by a local old lady, who walks you through a basic recipe, or to just chill out at home watching cooking shows for random tips and tricks. As you go out and talk to people, you’ll get some pointers, like the idea of simmering sauces to thicken them, or what types of dishes certain ingredients are good for. You’ll also acquire new techniques, like the ability to ‘slice thinly’ or ‘cut into bite-sized pieces’ rather than your starter option of ‘cut into rough chunks’ or learning to pan-steam something by putting a lid on it.
The process of actually cooking your meal involves putting together a recipe via a series of context bubbles, a bit like a macro builder or visual scripting engine. Step one – grate ginger. Step two – thinly slice pork, and so on. Once you’ve structured the recipe to the best of your abilities, you press cook, and the recipe gets presented to the LLM entities making up your beloved family. Each one has a set of preferences and requests each week, usually shouted out at you directly before they leave after each meal, and the local models included in the game [which is presumably why this visual novel is five fucking gigs] run through your recipe and analyze it in that inscrutable way modern AIs do, spitting out an A-but-B critique just like a professional cooking show judge, and even a score to get composited into your average performance.
It’s honestly a really cool idea, and the first time I’ve seen a visual novel with a good hook, or a pitch for AI integration that isn’t the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. The cool thing is that you’re obviously guided to make something safe the first week, specifically the ginger pork the old biddy teaches you exactly how to make, but you’re free to go off the dome, grab whatever shit you want, and give anything you want a go. I opted to make my own recipe for lemon chicken stir fry for the first week, and though I didn’t have all the techniques I probably needed to do it right, I still got an S rank eval at the end of the day. Not surprised my Japanese offspring were so fussy about broccoli, a little surprised my granddaughter criticized my use of lemon and suggested chili instead, and in a particularly dead-eyed flat affect that revealed a bit too much the machine code puppeting the 8 year old anime child.
That said, I have no idea how robust these LLMs are, what criteria they’re actually checking against, or if they’re just comparing your recipe to a library of real, STOLEN recipes. I would have to experiment a lot with sticking random incoherent steps in, mixing disgusting ingredients together, and trying to outright sabotage my meals to have any way to tell what’s going on inside the Black Box of Digital Sentience threatening to steal all our jobs and lie to us 1/100th as much as our government and media already do. I don’t even know how seasoning works, since if you MIX ingredients, you cannot then ADD the mixture to the dish as a combined sauce… or maybe you can, and my Grandpa just hadn’t leveled up enough or defeated the gatekeeper boss that unlocks Sauce Synthesis Technique. And most of all, I don’t really have the time or energy to stress test this stuff, because the AIs take almost as long to ‘taste’ each meal as a real person would to eat the whole plate.
Cook for Me, Grandpa! has genuinely piqued my interest. I don’t know if it really has legs, if it’s really analyzing dishes better than a hand-crafted script, if the gimmick of having HUNDREDS of ingredient options makes things better or worse, or if it’s healthy for me to let a Worldwide Worse Deadly Gangster Communist Computer God stroke my ego over how good my recipe for grilled thighs is. I do know that its a cute idea, and despite my grandkids turning into Food Network hosts it does capture the tension of cooking for other people pretty well. The store page hints at other NPCs to meet and even a ‘hard mode’ where you have to specify the length of cooking and more details at each step, which could either make the system more engaging or just needlessly complicated with no real impact. Finally, I thought it was cute that the data gathering opt-in this time was them scraping your submitted recipes into a database that presumably people can use, like, the way you search for ‘real’ recipes online. Hopefully they do that and include the scores your AI family gave each meal so you can sort based on ‘AI generated Japanese child’ preferences for your next real life meal.
I was pretty busy last night, and then I spent longer than I expected playing Verho, so there’s only three games today. Kind of only two. Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles. ChatGPT, tell me how cookies crumble. Ahh…