Tagged indie

At 10 years old I wanted to be white. I didn't want my nappy hair, or my broad nose, or my full lips. I didn't want my chestnut eyes, let alone my dark brown skin. I couldn't readily change any of those so I changed what I could. I started talking differently, I subbed out Jamaican patois for something generically "American." I shunned reggae and dancehall for soft rock or whatever came out of American Idol. I hated when my stepmother prepared ackee and saltfish with fried breadfruit, I just wanted Fruit Loops for breakfast. I used the name Keith online. At 10 years old I was already bombarded with American media. Beautiful was straight, shoulder length hair. Smart had blue-green eyes. Eloquent was thin, pursed lips. Cool was always pale, white skin. I don't know how common this experience was worldwide but I'm sure most of the globe is fluent in a "for export only" Americana due to US cultural imperialism.

I wouldn't realise what were shown on the television and in the cinemas were more specific than just "white" for years. The classic coming of age stories, produced in and sold by Hollywood, depicted a manicured, idealised, and specific teenagerdom where even whiteness was depicted in narrow bands. Accents were homogenised and high school caste systems were codified along lines of interest and activities. These suburban backlots for nostalgic dreams embellished a privileged adolescence. All that said, it also had a clear appeal — a desire to return (or to arrive for the first time) to a simpler time. Structured days that gave way to chaotic weekends and lazy summers. Closer friends in both proximity and relations, and a lot more time to do whatever or to figure things out. In reality the pressures of adulthood and the evils of the world have no respect for suburban zoning much less ones status as a minor, but in the coming-age-film, teenagers are typically eased into adulthood.

The teen comedy is a permutation of the coming-of-age film that adds its own layer of strange world logic. Here pain is temporary and everything is funny. Anything tragic is off camera; there's no overdosing, no police shootings, no debilitating injury from belly flopping into a kiddie pool from the third floor. The teen comedy revels in the perceived invulnerability of youth. In other words, kids do dumb shit because they don't know better and the teen comedy imagines a world where the decisions made get more ridiculous but the consequences are less severe.

Mixtape (2026) is a direct adaptation of most, if not all, of the tropes of the Hollywood teen comedy/coming-of-age film. It was developed by Australian studio Beethoven & Dinosaur and is set in a fictional Californian town. The player, for most of the game's runtime, is anchored to Stacey Rockford, a recent high school graduate planning her last 24 hours in her sleepy home town before she heads to New York. The thing to know about Stacey is that her "mixtapes are magic." She dreams of becoming a music supervisor, think picking out the music for theme parks, films, advertisements etc., and through some off-screen sleuthing finds out where an higher-up in a company she rates frequents. Her plan is to ambush said higher-up at a Starbucks or something, hand her the mixtape, and wow her into getting a job. No one questions the feasibility of this plan, because, again, her "mixtapes are magic."

So for this last day, flanked by her two best friends Van Slater and Cassandra Morino, she has planned their final adventure down to the accompanying music. For the most part that means securing booze, reminiscing, and attending their final party together to a 22 song soundtrack. Structurally the game, darts between present day and reflections among the friends with each chapter introducing a song via fourth wall break where Stacey turns to the camera and delivers a paragraph or so about the track you're about to hear with the energy of a daytime radio DJ. The game itself is the "mixtape."

That mixtape itself is a big problem. A few of my peers have dissected the playlist, noting the unlikelihood that a suburban white girl would be listening to all or any of it. This is a fun exercise albeit one that grazes a larger point. The layers of artifice in an Australian dev team crafting a video game adaptation of a teen movie tropes (itself hopefully convincingly argued by yours truly as an artificial simulacrum of American adolescence) means accuracy was of little concern. That there is a 2011 song on the tape emphasises this. So, looking at this as solely the decisions of team of people long past their teenage years looking to soundtrack a story of teenage rebellion from the lofty perspective of the 2020s — it's a very white soundtrack.

The only two songs by black artists are two of the oldest songs on the soundtrack — "Have You Seen Her" by the Chi-Lites (1971) and Alice Coltrane's "Galaxy in Turiya" (1972). By no means bad songs, but as most of the soundtrack features music from white artists from 1969 to 2011, it comes across a little strange. Hip Hop is one of the newer genres of music in the grand history of the medium, and while it builds on many older genres including jive and reggae, in popular history it's credited as being invented by DJ Kool Herc at a block party where he used two turn tables to isolate the "beat" (highly percussive) part of a track playing it longer as that was often the crowd favourite part of the song. The year Herc debuted that technique was 1973. That Mixtape features music by Black Artists before but not after the popularly cited birth year of Hip Hop is a grimly funny coincidence. This feels worse given an exchange between Stacey and Cassandra:

Stacey: "What's the music situation at Camille's party? DJ?"

Cass: "Yeah. One of her friends from LA. DJ Dropout. Hip Hop. House stuff."

Stacey: "I'll bring some CDs. Just in case."

Quick aside: suburban kids in the 90s were 100% banging LA rap. They were going bar for bar, word for word with no pauses and no substitutes. They were saying "nigga" in hi-fidelity. Slurs in flac. This isn't relevant.

My criticism focuses on Hip-Hop because [I'm black and] for many it does soundtrack being a street rat and living in opposition to oppressive authority and the law.

On the topic of "the law" and race, there's Cassandra. Cass is a biracial teenager and, until recently, a parent's dream child. She's top of her class and an athlete to boot. At some point, before the events of the game, Cass decides to break bad. Being the perfect little girl was too suffocating. Her arc is nothing earthshattering but Cass is, by far, the most interesting character in the game. Her father, the Asian police officer Morino, is the only parent present in the plot. Every other parent is a narrative spectre existing only in photographs, voice over, or faceless cameos. As a result, Officer Morino pulls double duty. He is the most prominent racialised character within the game and the representation of parenting knotted up in legislation, oppression, and debilitating expectation.

There's a moment when the gang is hanging out in Cass's room when Slater bluntly asks her, "why does he have a stick up his ass?" Cass doesn't refute this but notes that her grandad was the same and being Asian in the 50s in the States probably shaped their outlook. If the teen-comedy is this breezy narrative that sweeps you up in a world funnier and more painless than our own then this is the moment the wind stops and gravity send the plot hurtling down to earth. It's not that a comedy cannot broach the topic of model minority, racism and immigration, but it requires the plot to spotlight it to skewer it or at the very least a deft hand to zoom past it with a wink. The audience and the artists both in on the joke. Slater goes "Oh... fair." We never touch this again.

When Officer Morino appears on screen for the first time he is well past his boiling point. To him Cass has fallen in with a bad crowd — she's skipping classes and smoking weed. He doesn't trust her. She's not his little girl anymore. Importantly, Stacey isn't the only one leaving town; soon, Cass will head to LA for university. In a cruel and desperate bid to get his way of thinking through to Cass, he not only grounds her for the weekend, ruining any plans she had to spend with Stacey before the latter went off to New York in the morning, but informs her that she will not be heading to LA. Instead, she will enrol closer to home, maybe commute to school. Neither Cass nor Stacey takes this well although for different reasons:

Stacey: "You promised you'd go to Camile Cole's party"

Cass: "What?"

S: "You promised. It'll ruin my soundtrack."

C: "I'm fucking grounded."

S: "Sneak out."

C: "I wouldn't have to sneak out if you weren't leaving."

S: "Whatever man, just be there."

At this point, we have to talk about Stacey. Here she takes an unreasonable and selfish position albeit one I don't take issue with. It's all but explicit text that Stacey is some kind of autistic. Earlier in the narrative, during one of the reflection scenes, she explains her relationship to music and her headphones.

"Most of the time if I don't have music on, I get the panic. Time feels like it's drifting by. I feel like I'm wasting something. Sometimes I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be feeling. Some days I feel nothing at all. But if you pick the right song, it holds you in the moment, it gives you meaning. Because the music's going somewhere and you're going with it."

This is one of the many times in this game where music is used to explain an outlook on life. Here it is established a dependency or a way to cope. It doesn't blunt the insensitivity of what Stacey says but it gives context for why this is a big deal for her. I want to be clear, I didn't want this game to soften Stacey's characterisation. I like this prickliness. I like how much she sucks. That said I don't think she is interesting enough to anchor the narrative for the game's entire runtime. It's why the second half of the game is stronger, the camera drifts, even if it's for just a bit.

However, it is in the moment after this conversation that the game fully loses me. We stay anchored to Stacey in an extended skateboarding sequence. She's flipping off cars, mail boxes, whatever and exploding them as The Smashing Pumpkins' "Love" blares in the background. This goes on for minutes. The mixtape is ruined and she needs catharsis. Keep in mind that Cass has just experienced quite possibly the worst moment of her life. All her plans up in smoke in an instant as she is betrayed by her caregiver. Her father and her have been at loggerheads, but this is the man that until very recently she was moulding her life to make happy.

But we're stuck with the white girl. Her rage takes precedent. By the time we see Cass again at the gang's hideout in the woods, she's calmer. She did sneak out and she is going to the party. We don't get to see her make that choice. The developers are willing to break away from Stacey when necessary for a gag such as in the mini game where the player pilots an inebriated Slater in a video rental store but not to afford Cass her moment. She is understanding and patient in ways that Stacey never is. She defers her anger despite it being the most justified. The plot never realises but Cass trades one emotional jailor in her father, for another in her white best friend.

The selfishness of perspective extends to how this game approaches music. The truth of the world of Mixtape is that Stacey is prodigiously good at making playlists. Her relationship to music is atypical and passionate. She'll make a snap judgement on a person solely based on which bands they like. Again, she's an asshole. When I think of the mixtape as an object in culture, I associate it with sharing. It is a symbol of romance, you make a tape and you give it to someone you fancy. You make a playlist for a road trip to cater to everyone in the car. As far as the game is concerned, Stacey is the only character with taste in music. The mixtape, the game's soundtrack, exists as proof of this. It's the soundtrack of her last day because of her batshit plan to ambush an executive in New York. The mixtape is how she plans on securing that job. Her plan to secure her job scuttles the weeks of planning that her, Slater, and Cass have done towards a road trip. It is the source of persistent sniping by Cass who really wanted her best friends there to see her off to university.

It's not that Mixtape doesn't understand that Stacey's attitude is not tenable for healthy friendships but it's not willing to fully condemn it. There's no real comeuppance. The allure of the playable movie musical montage is too strong. To have a proper about face would be to indict the structure of the game; Stacey would have to cede control of music supervision. The closest the game gets is giving Slater one of the fourth wall breaks. He gets to introduce Joy Division That's it. She still controls the music at the party, she still goes to New York.

There is a moment in this game that I love. It's a one-on-one between Slater and Stacey. Slater is your archetypical stoner but also an artist and musician. There's a running subplot throughout the game where Stacey tries to convince Slater to let her listen to his album and it leads to my favourite conversation in the game:

Slater: "But you make an album - that says too much. It says this is who I am in this period of my life. And I know no one's going to listen to it, but if they did...they'd see...me. Don't ya think that's weird? I don't really wanna like put that out into the world."

Stacey: "I get it. Music is serious. You gotta show me though."

"No way."

"Why not?"

"You'll dissect it like a frog. You'll see my insides. What if you listen to it and realise I'm a psycho or something?"

"If it captures you right now, I'd want that...I'd wanna listen to that. If I could take you to New York on a cassette tape. I'd be braver."

It's powerful sentiment that puts the rest of the game in a weird relief. This part is just pure projection but I cannot understand Stacey's relationship to music. Music is the medium of memory for me. It's people and places, if I hear a song it brings me back in time. That's nostalgia right? I should be in lockstep with this game but I don't want to craft a moment to the music. Songs bring me back to faces. I can remember voices, the touch of skin. I can recall conversations, good and bad. La Dispute makes me think of Mari. Gucci Mane makes me think of Max. Amy Winehouse reminds me of my cousin. Chance the Rapper's Acid Rap mixtape, specifically, makes me think of Jeanelle and Romahlio. Stromae reminds me of Ariel. Adele reminds me of Sarah. Buju Banton's Driver reminds me of Paul. I have too many songs for church. A few for my parents Every Kartel and Movado song from like 2008 to 2010 is maybe just an era of growing up in Jamaica, god. Everyone I ever dated has a song if not an entire artist. Memories of graduations, funerals, everything can be summoned, and some times only be summoned, through music.

Music in Mixtape feels isolating, almost competitive. Taste is a thing wielded like a weapon. It's a means to build yourself up. It's the small town nerd shit. You know the hyper fixation that makes you special while the town "normies" go crazy for something "dumb" like sports or whatever. They don't like the right things or if they do they don't like enough. This too feels like a coming-of-age movie trope, the kid who needs to leave because their dreams are too big for the area code or are just plain misunderstood. There's usually some comeuppance there right? You get your dream but at the expense of something you took for granted. I don't think that quite happens in Mixtape. Not in any way that matters at least. Stacey might say she'll miss the town though is there anything in the dying throes of the night that demonstrates that? She gets her perfect day but I guess Slater gets to break the fourth wall once.

I keep thinking about one of the opening lines of this game where Stacey urges you, the player, "always make a soundtrack, because pretty soon you won't be listening to music, you'll be listening to who you were." At first I thought about finding new music and my parents. I don't think either of them have heard a new-to-them song in the past 20 years. They've found their soundtrack for the rest of their lives. I think that when you start closing yourself off to new things, that's when age sets in. Carcinization into a curmudgeon. But that's clearly not what that line is saying, right? This is a depicting an American suburban life that never existed or didn't exist for the vast majority of Americans much less the world. It's boasting a playlist of all but one song predating the year 2000. So what does this warning mean? Who is it for if not the developers of this game? I still don't have an answer.

Mixtape is the kind of game that if it hit me at an earlier point in my life, I would be all about it. Playing it now, at a fresh 31 years of age, I oscillated between boredom and repulsion. That makes me feel good if I'm being honest. I get to laud my superior taste over one person, me. The person who I was at 12 years. The person who hated himself, his culture, and insisted on bright, sugary, empty American cereal for breakfast.

Spoilers for Thirsty Suitors

All of our anxieties seep their way into the art we create and consume. So what does it say about us that we keep making art about reconciling with our parents? In the past 5 years we’ve seen generational trauma, and subsequent reconciliation, rendered in gargantuan scale. Domee Shi’s “Turning Red” blows up puberty and the frustration born from the impossible expectation Asian women face (and inherit) as “model minorities” to kaiju level proportions. The Daniels’ Best Picture winner “Everything Everywhere All At Once” collapses the multiverse because nothing short of that will address decades of repressed mother-daughter angst. Outerloop’s Thirsty Suitors translates a similar interpersonal friction and generational trauma to over-the-top cooking mini-games and extravagant RPG battles. It also helped me put into words how I want to think about love.

Thirsty Suitors is a turn-based RPG, narrative game, cooking game, skateboarding, rekindle friendship and flirt with your exes game. Serial heartbreaker Jala returns home to Timber Hills after her latest relationship falls apart, but for the first time she’s come out on the losing end. She moves back in with her parents, her sister is not talking to her, and she has to confront six of her exes -- well they confront her.

Jala is everyone’s “the ex.” It’s a universal concept — the person you spend the better part of a year or more recovering from. You either have one, are one, or are somewhere on the waiting list. Fights in Thirsty Suitors are melodramatic affairs where relatives are summoned like RPG gods and status effects such as poisoned and paralysed are swapped for ‘thirsty' and ‘impressed.’ It’s not deep, but the way the combat flows into the narrative keeps things moving. At the end of a fight, you reconcile, but on their terms.

The cooking mini-games shift the focus from Jala’s relationship with her exes to her relationship with her parents. Jala’s parents walk her through recipes, commentate on her comings and goings, and tell her stories. I’ve written about the utility of cooking as familial expression and conducting culture across generations in Venba and all of that applies here. These cooking sections are when you most interact with Jala’s mother, Rukmini.

Unpacking Rukmini is difficult. She’s a first generation Indian immigrant fluent in passive-aggressive English. There’s no doubt she loves her daughters, Rukmini accepts Jala’s bisexuality and her choice of partners, but she’s also overbearing and demanding. I hesitate to call her abusive, the term conjures up horrific physical violence and wanton neglect that Rukmini never enacts. But it’s hard to completely circumvent the term either, and if I’m honest, I’m reticent to use it because Rukmini reminds me of my parents.

My folks aren’t immigrants, not in the migrating between countries sense, but they moved from rural Jamaica to Kingston, our capital city. My stepmother, as much my mother as anyone else in my life, made a similar transition but from a garrison community to middle class Jamaican life. There’s an intimacy with poverty and hardship that never leaves. Social strata aren’t porous membranes, they’re rigid structures designed to pen people into the lot they’re born into. Thrusting yourself in a foreign space with the mission of ‘do better, both for me and my children’ — it has to change you.

There’s an exchange between Jala and Rukmini in the lead up to the first cooking mini-game. Jala’s father Arvind suggests that she takes the opportunity while she’s home to take cooking lessons from her mother, “It would mean a lot to your mother if you asked,” he says. Why can’t she just ask you directly? It doesn’t go smoothly during the cook either. Rukmini is incapable of seeing her 25-year-old daughter as an adult, she needs to see her wash her hands in front of her and seems physically incapable of giving a compliment.  Talking to your parents — talking to my parents, is occasionally a nightmare. It’s bargaining for autonomy with the cadence and calm of a hostage negotiator, as any wrong word or fluctuation in tone is immediately seized upon and exploited.

The final cooking mini-game brings in Paati, Rukmini’s mother. Paati is in town for Jala’s sister’s Aruni’s wedding. Before the ceremony she wants to inspect Jala’s cooking, but in actuality it’s to evaluate Rukmini’s parenting. Paati is exacting and inflexible, the ultimate matriarch and a shadow that looms over the family. My grandparents only exist as nostalgic stories, a distance afforded by death. I wonder if my father would shrink in front of his mother like Paati does in front of hers.

To form a cogent point about the interactions in Thirsty Suitors and how they affect me, I’m going to appropriate a term -- “love language.” The term was originally coined by Gary Chapman, an American author and marriage counsellor who, in 1992, published his book ‘The Five Love Languages: The Secret To Love That Lasts.’ In the book, Chapman describes five ways of showing/receiving affection. I don’t recommend reading it, the legacy of ‘The Five Love Languages’ is plastered headlines of how to find your love language on out-of-date lifestyle magazines at your GP’s office and buzzy headlines that pop up when a website needs to hit a click quota. So for the purpose of this piece, and maybe beyond if you’re so inclined, we’re going to define a Love Language as the way we talk and interact with our loved ones -- be it friends, partners, or family.

From Paati to Rukmini and then to Jala we can examine a shared vocabulary regarding love. It’s non-renewable and thus should be doled in controlled quantities. Affection is aggressive but also a tool for control; all three use love (familial, and in Jala’s case romantic) to maintain the upper hand in their interpersonal dynamics.

Jala ends this cycle by pulling from everyone she’s reconciled with to push back against Paati, the ‘original sin’ of stilted affection. Like any language, we learn love from a variety of sources, but our parents are our first, and usually greatest, teachers. We get their lips and their voices and a lifetime sorting out which parts of them to keep and which parts to throw out, hoping after each decision that we’ve made the right choice. Every friend and lover is an opportunity to take stock of how we love: what compromises are we willing to make? Where do we reinforce? What can we learn? It's an excruciating process; bodies and lives get tangled, and often there is no safe and painless way to untie people.

PS: In 2023 gamers discovered thirst and fell in love with twink white vampires, skinny white elf women, and slightly less skinny red women and I can’t express for free or in line of sight of the crucifix in my living room the feelings I have for Diya a brown woman who is thick as fucking porridge and I have to stop, I have to move on, we’re moving on.

PSS: I call Paati “the original sin” and that feels bad, but not bad enough for me to edit this. The “original sin” is probably the British, I live my life blaming them for pretty much everything, and it serves me pretty well. India was a British colony and like all British colonies was plundered for profit and robbed, or at the very least delayed, a chance at being a leading global economy. The British also ransacked the culture of every territory they violated. The promise of colonialism, or its justification so colonists and would-be emperors could convince themselves that life after death was still on the table, was rescuing indigenous people from their own culture. Absorption into the British Empire, even at the lowest levels, was rescuing the masses who didn’t know better. Living under that rule, where being yourself was defiance, and you had to smuggle your culture through their food and their religion and maybe eventually smuggle yourself out of your own country, away from your own…I don’t know, that has to change you. Like an animal in the wild surrounded by predators, you become caustic. Spiny. Too tough to get chewed up by the world. It takes active work to undo evolution, to return to a version of us that does not have the genetic memory of shit going awful. It’s a multi generational project.

Venba lays on a couch, her hair is a mess. She stares at the title.

My parents decided that the kitchen was no place for a boy. Instead, on their command, I shadowed visiting labourers -- carpenters, masons, electricians and plumbers -- working on our home, a renovation project that never ended. My parents hoped I would learn something from them through osmosis; as a child, I was so shy I'd bury my face in couch cushions to avoid eye contact. Now, an adult and comparatively trepid, I still can't imagine interviewing a man about elbow pipes and straights while half his legs hang out from under my sink.

While cooking was kept clandestine, food was, and remains, beloved and unavoidable. The matriarchs in my family had an enviable talent -- in under an hour, with any combination of ingredients, they could prepare a weeknight dinner that was inoffensive and often delicious. Over the weekend their powers were unleashed. On their feet the entire day, they would cook a big late breakfast that flowed into a feast for dinner. Coconut milk perfumed the house, husked from the coconuts from the tree outside, and used in just about everything. Breadfruit, roasted and wrapped in last week's news, was sliced thin and fried until crispy and not a second longer. Overnight soaked peas (kidney beans) were pressure cooked until tender then stirred into rice cooked in, of course, coconut milk. Oxtail braised in browning, a sauce made of brown sugar and water (almost caramel-like), until it barely clung to its bone. I could go on.

Today I woke up to an empty house and the sounds of traffic. There is no breakfast bustle and will not be until I saunter out of bed, past the sink filled with last night's, and possibly the night before's, dishes and towards the stove. I will not husk a coconut, I will hover over a kettle and wait to pour boiling water over a cup of instant ramen. Most days and most meals are like this -- quick, easy, food as fuel and nothing more.

Many video games interpret this literally. Food fills various gauges -- health, mana, or some equivalent resource -- buffing stats, providing extra lives, etc. Even games nominally about cooking, such as Overcooked! and Cook, Serve, Delicious!, focus more on the restaurant industry, bringing in more customers, and earning more money. Phoenix Simms, for Paste Magazine, wrote about the commodification of food in video games and how Visai Games' Venba shows that cooking can be so much more.

There are moments of great aesthetic pleasure regarding food in games, such as the evocative animations given to the hundreds of recipes one can cook in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Or moments of comfort and comic relief, like the cooking sequences in Monster Hunter World. But until recent decades, games centred on food and cooking have been ones that characterize food as buffs, achievements or part of a commercial venture (think Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley and any number of restaurant simulators). Not often has cooking in games been allowed to simply show us the identity of the characters we’re playing.

Venba alternates between cooking and dialogue. As the titular Venba, you recreate recipes from a damaged and poorly documented Tamil cookbook. In between cooking, you click through exchanges between Venba and her family -- her husband Paavalan and their son Kavin -- discussing the issues that most immigrant families face in majority-white countries; returning home, facing marginalisation, and assimilation. Food isn't separate from any of this. Venba makes Tamil food because she is Tamil and never entertains being anything else. Her food connects her culture and more directly, to her mother.

Food takes on added importance after Kavin is born. He's never been to India and has to learn how to live, without a guide, as a 2nd generation immigrant. I've never been a minority, not outside of trips to the States to visit family. It was not a thing I appreciated until I was followed by a security guard at Publix when I was 12 years old. I wasn't even a particularly large 12-year-old, just suspiciously black. But I've been susceptible to the allures of North America. When Kavin demands pizza over his mother's cooking, it's painful but understandable. Neither Tamil nor Jamaican food makes the television ads or the billboards you see on your way into town. It's "Louisiana Fast", it is "Fresh never Frozen", it's "When you're here, you're family." Learning to love your own culture is guilt-inducing work, it's seeking atonement for years of betrayal to yourself.

I think cooking is the ultimate act of love. Taking food, something we all need to live, and turning it into something else, something more than its ingredients, to give flavour to sustenance is beautiful. Every dish has its story and learning how to cook it, should be learning that story, to connect with the people who cooked before you. That's important to me. I'm black and Jamaican. Where people have family trees, we have shrubs. But the dishes we make tell the stories of the people who never got a chance to be the loving parents you see in Venba.

Venba and Paavalan stare out the window as we watch from outside.

Jerk Chicken is probably the most famous Jamaican dish. You can find in football stadiums and restaurants around the US and UK. You can find the spice rub in most supermarkets. Jerk has a spicy, smoky, charred flavour that is hard to describe for me; Jerk doesn't taste like other things, other things taste like Jerk. It's the perfect distillation of Jamaican history. Maroons, escaped slaves who lived in the mountains and rugged areas, were simultaneously on the run and at war with their British colonizers. Stripped from their African homes, Indigenous Amerindians guided them on which spices and herbs to combine for flavour and preservation. This was a time when cooking was dangerous, any smoke would alert the British to where they were musket in tow. So the Maroons started cooking in pits, trapping the smoke, and giving the meat its unique flavour.

Sometimes this is what I think about when I eat/make Jerk. Other times I think about my Uncle cooking the best Jerk Pork I've ever had, despite being a vegan and Rastafarian for 45 years prior. This is what I see in Visai Games' Venba -- this is what I feel when an adult Kavin recreates a dish his mother made for him or goes to visit her in India and she teaches him how to make dosas. I want that. I want to learn everything my family has ever made for me so that when we are separated by distance or time or death I can make something that captures how they felt about me. And I can eat it.

Why the fuck Do I know how to make a perfect steak?

First, Play Venba.

Okay, level with me because this is going to be messy, inconsistent, and probably won't find a good conclusion. I finished everything above this two months ago. I sat on it because I started to think about food and microwaved my brain. Let's say food, and cooking are everything I said it is, it's love, and identity, and memory -- intimate and collective. Cool, how does that work post-globalisation?

Last year my TikTok algorithm was hijacked because I liked one video about Jamaican Jerk Chicken in Canada and now I'm bombarded by food influencers and they all cook the same thing. I can cook a perfect medium-rare steak. I can make pasta from scratch. Why?

These aren't bad things to know, but they feel increasingly like common knowledge amongst my peers, here and abroad. The other day a friend of mine pointed out that there are roughly 6 cuisines represented in the conventional emoji slate. There's some spaghetti, sushi, hamburger, fries, and baguette. And every supermarket has instant ramen. There's a Burger King on every corner in the world. An earlier draft of this used the term "culinary imperialism" and it's not here right now because I'm having a calm day.

Food is content. Cooking programming migrated from television networks to social media over the last decade and created a bizarre Frankenstein cuisine devoid of cultural history. Everyone is a coffee expert and will tell you about it. Calorie-counting amateur nutritionists show off the next great dish that will maximise your gains at the gym all while going 'ew double carbs.' Male influencer cooks who perhaps were similarly kept out of the kitchen have masculinised the space through sexual innuendo -- jerking off anything phallic and literally 'slapping their meat.'

I don't think this is all bad, the guys jerking off the meat need to fucking stop though, but it's something, right? You don't need an intimate relationship with everything you eat but surely it matters that we're all kind of floating towards the same things? Why this and not that? Is it because sushi is that much more photogenic? Or because certain cultures are inherently pervasive?

And of course, you can develop your relationship and culture with food that's new to you. I think about my mother's lasagna that she made because I panicked and said my favourite meal was lasagna when she was pushing me for an answer. It was fine but I think about her whenever I eat any lasagna.

And I get it, who among us doesn't want a quick, easy meal? Our lives are split into sleep, eating, and work. Despite needing the first two to live, we need to do the latter to get them. They're something to be earned. So you cut corners, cooking goes out the window, sleep is a premium, it's a mess. But we can't all be eating fucking overnight oats???

I was in Chicago when some Youtuber made a viral video about Oxtail and then I was priced out of Oxtail because white people went feral and market forces or some shit. Despite oxtail, trotters, liver, etc., historically being the pieces that white people gave to their slaves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, times change, but you get why this feels weird right?

Anyway, play Venba. It's 90 minutes long. Has fewer words than this piece which definitely got away from me.

Blue Valentine (2010) was the first film I rented on my own. It was a bad decision. I cannot imagine what the cashier thought at the time. They suggested one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films and then something else animated. But I was dead set on this indie romance film. Desperate to carve out any semblance of taste. I remember their raised eyebrows to this day.

Directed by Derek Cianfrance, Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams playing a couple whose relationship is on the brink of collapse. The film hops back and forth through time showing their meet-cute and how it falls apart; moments of tenderness juxtaposed with moments of cruelty. Each poignant moment is laced with tragedy and right up until the end, you hope they might rekindle the affection they once had.

You get one good love. If you’re lucky. That was the lesson I took from it. It fucked up my understanding of romance for a bit. As a teenager in Catholic school, how else was I going to learn how people work?

There is inherent horror to love. It’s vulnerable -- you’re sharing a life and tangling it with another. It’s exposing all your tender parts and weaknesses. It’s showing someone how to kill you and trusting them to never try to.

AAA games are uninterested in playing with the full breadth of the emotion. Romance is a common mechanic in games, you’re as likely to stumble into a debate on a Discord server about optimal builds as you are about who is the hottest companion in Mass Effect. Heartbreak is frustratingly less portrayed, let alone systemised. It’s at odds with the power fantasy that most big-budget games thrive on. Romantic systems are supplementary or afterthoughts that feel grafted onto the game. They are subplots and subsystems that need to come to a head before the plot is over.

Relatively smaller titles and independent games can centre relationships and dig into the arcs that are underrepresented in their larger contemporaries. Mountain Studios’ Florence speeds through a woman’s young adult life as she navigates burnout, a burgeoning romance, and separation. Death is a Whale’s piece breaks down how the game uses its interface and gameplay to depict lives blending -- the parts that are hidden and those kept on display. Atlus’ Catherine leans directly into the horror. The player controls Vincent Brooks, a man so terrified of commitment that his dreams are infiltrated by his own anxieties and intrusive thoughts as he wrestles with adultery. Catherine isn’t as small a game as Florence. It’s developed by much of the [in]famous Persona team and carries a lot of the polish and extravagant style associated with that RPG franchise. Like the Persona series, it uses the supernatural to express anxieties and emotions from the conventional world. Unlike the Persona series which relegates the relationship/romance aspect to an auxiliary system, Catherine spotlights it as the plot.

The itch.io shopfront is littered with games delving into all aspects of love and romance. Text adventures, mini-RPGs, and tabletop games that explore multiple interpretations of intimacy. My favourite of the bunch is author and playwright Franny Mestrich’s ‘answer these 10 questions and i'll tell you what kind of lover you are.’ It’s a small, free, text-based interactive fiction game that’s playable in your browser. It won’t take you longer than 15 minutes. Content Warning for a portrayal of toxic relationships.

Mestrich describes ’10 questions’ as ”a short story that's sort of like if a prose poem and a BuzzFeed quiz had a baby and they all fucking hated you.“ It’s a perfect description. The game starts innocently enough. A nameless interrogator asks “What’s your favourite flower?” “What’s your ideal first date?” It captures the feeling of an earnest conversation with a stranger. An old friend, maybe? It’s only by the third question, “Is that the same date you took me on when we first met?” when it starts to click.

It captures the feeling of an ‘oh shit’ moment, running into an ex at the cafe. With no names and no graphics, you fill those in yourself. When it reveals that you’re talking to an ex, the ex, you can feel the tenor of the conversation change. The questions immediately skew more personal. It’s alienating, Mestrich writes both these characters with a very specific history and dynamic, yet relatable. What they bring out of each other feels universal.

As you continue the game, your options restrict as it corners you. It presents 4 possible answers when it asks for your ideal first date and then three options for the next question, and then you get one response. You’re not allowed to be bigger than this conversation, and you sure as hell can’t walk away. You can’t shrink, either. They know where to poke that will hurt the most, they know how to make you fight back.

Break-ups tap into a fear of change. It feels sudden, a cliff face tearing off from the land and sinking into the sea feels sudden. But in reality, there’s been a steady erosion, rock face whipped by salt, rain, and heat. You have to make sense of what you’re seeing, your body fighting the muscle memory perfected over hundreds of thousands of tiny interactions.

Fighting is intimacy as well. Something is comforting in the violence of sharp words aimed at our softest parts. It means you remember my softest parts and how to get there. Memories, in particular, are easy targets. Unmooring you from what you’ve held as fundamental truths.

‘10 questions’ makes me think about bodies and lives and the priest in high school who sat us down and told us divorce was a sin. Maybe he was onto something -- our bodies seem eager to tie themselves into knots so tight you need to cut them off to get loose. I think about ‘10 questions’ every day and have been for just short of a year now. I want more horror games in the mould — break my heart and rip me to pieces.