Tagged indie

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.