Lost Recipes allows the player to serve dishes from three different kitchens from three cultures throughout history Mayan, Chinese, and Greek.
It is thoughtfully delivered, and once you get past the disappointment of not being in a cooking game, really quite enjoyable to be a part of. Instead, Lost Recipes guides the player through several recipes in an authentic, interactive historical kitchen while picking up a few info-taining facts about the local culture along the way. Unlike a genuinely gamified cooking offering, Lost Recipes features neither the frantic energy of service nor the compulsions of score-chasing, both of which nest traditional cooking games firmly within the genre of Time Management games. To say that its marketing is muddled is an understatement.Ī reasonably brief time within the world of Lost Recipes reveals that what you actually have here is a virtual cooking experience, with a side of homage to oral tradition. Lost Recipes is categorised in the Oculus Store as an ‘app’ yet described on its store page as a cooking game. Under its announcement trailer on the official Meta Quest YouTube channel, it’s described as a “cooking simulator” at the start of a paragraph that itself concludes by calling it a game. Had the team at 6DOF Reviews decided to judge Lost Recipe against our gaming criteria, holding its merit against other offers within that genre, Schell Games’ latest creation would definitely not have fared well… ORDERING OFF MENU
When viewed as an “experience” instead of a “game”, this review can be quite positive, but make no mistake – If you are looking for a cooking game, move along. It’s important to be clear at the beginning, Lost Recipes is not a game. It was, sadly, this fact that has ultimately served me an amuse bouche of disappointment. The thought of a cooking game delivered by Schell Games, arguably one of VR’s premiere studios, had me virtually salivating in anticipation. When Lost Recipes was announced, I immediately called a resounding “Dibs!”. I also have two volumes of recipes published by Renuka Devi Choudhurani, who was the wife of the zamindar of Muktagacha and Kalipur in Bangladesh,” explains Subhajit.It’s no secret to regular readers of this site that I’m a big fan of VR Cooking games. I have a book by Bipradas Mukhopadhyay who passed away in 1914, which means the recipes are at least a century old. “Once I started off on this journey, I went deeper and deeper and it has been fascinating. Subhajit has always been a connoisseur of uncommon recipe books. Long before Lost and Rare Recipes became a recipe channel, it was marinating in the background of their lives in the form of a hobby. Subhajit himself was cooking by the age of 11, his first dish being Aloo Tikia. Subhajit’s widowed grandmother found innovative vegetarian dishes to make for the family, which she would always serve with rice. “People don’t have the time to invest in long-winded recipes anymore,” says Amit who grew up in a joint family with its varied members constantly trying their hand at different dishes ranging from Cabbage Soup to Bijoya Mishti. Subhajit and Amit have both grown up eating elaborate home-cooked food, but they’re starkly aware of the fact that those days are gone.