A shower of chopped onions fall into a bowl of broth, making little plinks on its surface. They are joined by thick ribbons of noodle, and then … an entire raw steak, which flops off the table. Then everything begins to levitate and pulse with multicoloured light.
Everyone I know is playing either Baldur’s Gate or Starfield, and here I am playing with my food. Nour: Play With Your Food is a strange wee game that I first played years ago at a video game convention, and it’s finally been released. The game presents you with delicious little scenes – a burger tray, a sushi set, a bath full of ice-cream with a shower that sprays colourful sprinkles – and then you press buttons to make delectable objects fall from the sky. Do it in time to the music, and weird stuff begins to happen. The lettuce will start dancing, or a jellyfish will show up.
It is disproportionately hard to make a straightforwardly delicious looking dish in Nour. It favours chaos. On the pizza level I got fed up of trying to make tomato sauce fall on to the pizza base properly and instead busted out a knife and a blowtorch, slicing everything up into pieces and then flambeing the remains. Food dyes and hammers and spells are nestled away in menus for you to use and see what happens.
Sometimes it feels like a very niche technological experiment to see exactly how many individual pieces of glistening bacon a PlayStation 5 can simultaneously render, as you spam the buttons. But really this is a piece of delicious interactive art, a kind of foodie stress dream where you can shoot a ray gun at a mushroom to make it quadruple in size, and doughnuts and pastries coalesce into a gently pulsating morass in a blue ether. The more you mess around, the more you discover; each level holds odd little secrets that you can only find if you experiment.
This probably sounds absurd, and it is, but I love it. Nour is part of a long tradition of strange, satisfying interactive tech art experiments – the type of game I used to enjoy playing in the early days of the PlayStation 3, when the nascent PlayStation Store was full of bizarre things such as .deTuned, in which you were presented with a sad-looking balding man in a chair and then experimented with the buttons to deform him and make him dance around in front of smiling blue robots. Or Linger in Shadows, a technology-transcending interactive nightmare of smoke and strangeness designed to wring impossible things out of the PS3’s architecture.
Some of these are what’s known as demoscene games: pieces of interactive art intended to display a programmer’s superlative abilities with the hardware. They emphasise music and audiovisual impact, don’t have any of the traditional things that games prioritise like objectives or enemies. Instead, they have interesting, beautifully rendered components that do weird things when you poke at them.
I find this type of interactive art very soothing. They free me from the constraints of “gamer brain” – the idea that play always has to have a point. Another classic of the genre that Nour brought to mind was Noby Noby Boy, by Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi, in which you play a stretchy caterpillar snake slithering around pastel-coloured playgrounds, eating doughnuts and wrapping your squiggly body around things. Sometimes little humans or turtles or cows hop on and ride you around for a while. You play with it like a toddler would, bashing things together to see what will happen.
Like experimental poetry, or sculpture, or visual art, you have to open your mind’s eye to things like Nour and appreciate them aesthetically without searching for structure. Finding that mindset is the biggest challenge. The bonus of experimental games, though, is that they tend to make you laugh more than any of those other art forms, as you poke at the controller (or blow on it) to see what nonsense will occur on the screen.
If this sounds appealing, download the game and just make a mess. You might enjoy it.
What to play
More surrealism this week from Spanish director and animator Nacho Rodríguez in the form of The Many Pieces of Mr Coo, an absurdist point-and-click adventure blessed with sublime hand-drawn animation and a range of artistic, musical and cultural influences. It’s short – over in less than an hour if you know what you’re doing – and you have to finish the whole thing in one go, or it’ll make you start again.
Our critic Phil Iwaniuk loved it, writing in his review: “It bobs along on a dream logic that makes sense while you play and then evaporates immediately after. Why did stealing a coin from that one-eyed lady end up giving you a sword to slay a crocodile? And how did you end up inside that egg with an unborn chick? It matters not. They’re vivid memories now, the kind that your brain will randomly turn over decades down the line when you’re trying to get to sleep.”
Available on: PC, PlayStation 4/5
Estimated playtime: 1-2 hours
What to read
Allow me to briefly puff out my chest with patriotic pride and recommend the Scottish Games Sale on Steam, to benefit Glasgow’s children’s hospital. Some standout games: sci-fi chiller Observation, snappy card-game Reigns, photography puzzler Viewfinder and silly stretchy puppy puzzler Phogs!
One of my favourite games of last year, Stray (the cyberpunk cat game), is to be made into a “hopepunk” movie directed by Nick Bruno of Nimona.
Nintendo has put out a video clarifying Charles Martinet’s new role as “Mario ambassador” – the character’s creator Shigeru Miyamoto puts in an appearance to talk up Martinet’s immense contribution as the former voice of Mario.
More bad news for E3: last year’s event partner ReedPop is out, there will be no LA event in 2025, and we are promised a “total reinvention” of the show for 2025. I am not tremendously optimistic.
What to click
Game developers furious as Unity Engine announces new fees
The quest for Sky Skipper, the rarest Nintendo arcade machine in the world
How a decade of playing Final Fantasy XIV has helped me through life and motherhood – Danielle Lucas
How Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was written: ‘you start with sticky notes’
Question Block
Question Block fixture Iain provides this week’s query – but before we get to it, if you have a question, even (especially?) if it’s a silly one, send it in by hitting reply on this newsletter.
Iain asks: “Your issue about the demise of classic games brought a tear to my eye – mainly because at one time I owned most of the titles mentioned (including Panzer Dragoon Saga!). Are there any titles you regret letting go?”
I’m one of those people who experiences a drastic urge to rid myself of possessions every few years, but I do hold on to books and treasured video games. Unfortunately all the games of my childhood came in fragile cardboard boxes with paper manuals, most of which were thrown away, so I now have a bunch of rare 90s video games with absolutely no value beyond the sentimental.
I regret not taking better care of my games’ packaging when I was young, but not as much as I regretted lending my prized copy of the original Conker’s Bad Fur Day to a friend’s boyfriend, who never gave it back. It would cost a couple of hundred quid to replace it now. Few games that have disappeared from my collection over the years – misplaced, lent out and forgotten, squirrelled away after a breakup – are truly irreplaceable. If something happened to my signed copy of Rez on the Dreamcast, I’d be raging.
