FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Games

Hone Your Finest Soup-Making Skills in this Game

'Apprentice Soup' is not for the weak of heart. Or mind.
All images courtesy EthanTilley

I've never been fired from an apprenticeship in soup making, but I've always dreamed of it. Apprentice Soup has finally come along to deliver my deepest fantasies to me.

It's a simple game. You work in a gross kitchen. You want to make soup. Some developers might choose to represent this through the minutiae of the job of soup making. It is easy to imagine a game where we get some carrots, garlic, chicken parts, and whatever the hell else goes into soup, use quick-reflex mechanics to show us cutting them up, and then dump them into the pot. Those games exist, and they're about cooking, and they're excellent.

Advertisement

Apprentice Soup bypasses all of that by embracing the feeling of making soup. The ingredients rain down from the sky, and you have to catch them in your giant soup pot. If an ingredient makes sense in soup, then you get points. If it doesn't, then you lose points.

On one hand, the game makes a lot of normative statements about how to make soup. Eggs, apparently, can never go in this soup. The same with lettuce. While I disagree conceptually, it's hard to argue with the fact that making soup in the moment requires a real feeling for what something might taste like. You have to go with your gut, literally, and you have to reject things (like bananas) that just don't work in any world.

Apprentice Soup is surprisingly hard, but so is making soup. I played four or five times, and I was fired every time. This isn't a world for my innovative soup recipes, I guess, but damn it I had to try.

You can download Apprentice Soup for Windows and Mac on itch.io.