Growing up in a particularly strict household, dinner time was always considered an important affair. From a young age I was taught how to set a table with all its dressings and how to place cutlery in its “proper” positions. No, we weren’t having anyone over for dinner – this was just how things were. My mother neatly cut out a placement chart for the dining table she found in a Better Homes and Gardens issue and taped that to the inside of our pantry door. Regardless of how colorful, loud and exciting the dinner seemed, we had to adhere to stuffy regulations one might encounter in a fine dining experience. It always seemed contrarian considering our rapt attention towards food shows that portrayed meals in fun, playful ways. Food can be more than a feast for the stomach – food also feeds the senses. From exquisite textures to the composition of the plate, food can unlock core memories and give us peace of mind. Food should be enjoyed in more ways than just eating it, which is where Nour: Play with Your Food finds its niche. With a self-explanatory title, Nour is a game that encourages new ways to enjoy food in a virtual sandbox feast. By taking all the creativity one can have with food and placing it in this buffet of physics-based meals, Nour creates various objective-less vignettes where players can run rampant. Each vignette offers a different kind of food with various ingredients to play with. Players can mix and match different elements that produce new and unique effects within the level. While players can interact with their food neatly, Nour’s gameplay feels purposefully crafted in a way to ensure players make a mess. What results is an ambient title that encourages trial and error entertainment. Nour is vibrant, sleek and does offer foodie fun, yet the game does suffer from inconsistencies that feel half-baked. Let’s uncover the messy feast that is Nour: Play with Your Food.
In the opening title sequence, Nour asks “What are the colors?” Poking at the possibility of synesthesia (a phenomenon where the brain routes sensory information to multiple unrelated senses and causes you to experience more than one sense simultaneously), Nour is thematically centered around hex color codes and the effect of colors on your perception. It’s an intelligent theme for the title, as you’re exposed to food in the game you cannot actually taste, touch or smell. Most enjoyment of food revolves around these senses. So instead, the title makes use of the power colors and sounds can offer. Nour offers a sleek, fine dining aesthetic with clean lines and visual flow as vibrant lofi hip-hop plays in the background. Overall, the title is visually appealing and is gorgeous to look at. The main theme is “food” and there’s a lot of gorgeous meals to look at.
Players will make their way through over twenty different vignettes of foods that contain various interactive elements. We’ll use “level” loosely here when referring to the game, as Nour doesn’t offer strict objectives and players can leave each vignette when they’ve had their fill of fun. Each meal starts out clean and aesthetically pleasing but easily can look like a tornado has wafted through by the end of the play time. It’s as if before digging into the food, Nour asks you to feast with your eyes first, and with good reason. Textures of objects look fantastic and each meal is composed beautifully – Nour made me hungry by just looking at the foods available. Burgers look juicy and tantalizing. Donuts and pastries are so beautifully rendered that it looks like you could reach into the screen to grab one. Each level offers various ways to interact with the meal, from using various kitchen accessories to actual magic spells that make food dance. Everything is pretty, but Nour does expect one to break out of perfectionism and make a mess. While there are no clearly-defined objectives on purpose, players may find themselves unlocking secrets based on the kinds of actions performed within each vignette. For example levels may unlock new areas to play in if food is interacted with appropriately, or certain foods used may attract a special hungry visitor seen throughout the game. None of this is explicitly stated, but it does speak to the developers creativity to put secrets in each vignette that players can discover.
Yet while the game does offer a lot in the way of variety of foods to play with, its controls leave a poor taste in the mouth. While Nour doesn’t offer strict objectives, players are encouraged to explore each vignette. For example, a major mechanic is the use of music creation alongside the soundtrack. It’s a wonderful idea to assign various sounds to ingredients that culminate into a larger musical composition when they’re added together – this also adds extra layers of creativity in each vignette. For example when playing with the ramen meal, adding different ingredients to the ramen bowl creates different compositions of background music and even ingredients create sounds when they’re dropped onto the dish. Once music is in full swing with various components, the game entices players to add food to the beat of the background music for additional effects – even offering rhythm assistance in the User Interface (UI) to help players identify when they’re on beat. Hitting the beats on time may also uncover new things about the vignette. While this is a fun idea in theory, the execution of this felt muddled.
It’s hard to interact with food on each beat, as the timing of food dropping onto the plate from off-screen lags behind the rhythm. Additionally, sound design is muddled and audio mixing makes the player feel disempowered – at one point I thought I was creating the sounds in the background, but instead the soundtrack overtakes any noise you make and you have to strain to discern anything you do. It leaves you feeling like children playing with pots and pans in the kitchen while the soundtrack turns to you and says, “that’s nice sweetie, now let me cook.” There are “combos” that can be unlocked depending on the input of buttons, but musical mechanics feel as if they could be pushed further. There’s no way to save sounds you make and no opportunity for really remixing anything. For a game that prides itself on making a mess, it feels as if you aren’t allowed to make “bad” music if desired when you cannot differentiate between player choice and the game itself.
Making music isn’t the only thing you’re able to do in a vignette, as there are various tools of the chef’s trade to play with. Whether it’s using a knife to cut objects into pleasing slices, playing with food coloring or whipping out the blow torch to melt things, Nour’s delightful physics mechanics cannot be overstated. The development team also deserves accolades for thoughtful design, as you can add new objects to the vignette with adequate structure in place. Limiters are placed within the programming to avoid memory overload and keep the game from crashing because of too many objects on screen. It allows you to safely spam ingredients without disrupting the game itself. You can even stack effects and use multiple tools on a item. You can burn an item with the blow torch and then use a ray gun to increase the size – now you have a giant melted meal if you wanted it to be that way. Various magical spells create a sense of whimsy within each vignette, even giving different perspectives for the included photo modes. Yet the execution of these effects feels like they could be better adjusted. For example, the perspective is off when using items. You may want to interact with something in the foreground and it looks like you can, but you’re unable to do so if you try.
Additionally, controls are not always consistent between levels. Some levels allow certain tools to be used while others do not. The game doesn’t do a great job at providing contextual clues either beyond the first couple of meals, so you may be left struggling to remember inputs or special features. At the time of this review the pause menu shows an option to look at controls, but navigating to this menu option shows nothing – only a graphic of the smiling jellyfish mascot for the game, making it seem like the controls are a mystery. There can often be a lot of sensory overload that makes it easy to miss some of the tutorial guides that pop up, and it feels inaccessible to players who may need to refresh themselves on the controls.
The consistency of controls aren’t helped further when keybindings are also inefficient. Frankly, you’ll want to play this game on a controller. Keybindings for mouse and keyboard feel awkward, as buttons 1-4 and QWER on the keyboard add ingredients and various buttons control other things. Keybindings felt like they were explained better when a controller was plugged in as well. I cannot at all remember if the game showed me the modifier buttons for mouse and keyboard – on a controller, you may press one of the bumpers to modify food and add different ingredients. On mouse and keyboard it seems these modified ingredients are bound to other keys that aren’t mentioned at all, and I only found this out through mashing keys. Camera control is also weird with mouse and feels more natural on a controller. The game reminds you that arrow keys can be used to navigate, but this is so subtle that it’s easy to forget – also sometimes tools selected to use will appear out of frame, so it becomes a task to change the camera so you can see what you’re working with. Some of these controls also feel like they feed into UI problems, as sometimes I couldn’t tell if I was using magical spells correctly. Some spells only feel like they work sometimes, while others are clearly shown that they’re affecting the vignette. For example you can set food items on fire, but rarely did I see that effect actually happening. These are cool effects when they do work, as you can jam out and cast spells that give us awesome close ups of food or make them defy gravity. It’s unfortunate that key bindings and UI issues mar the title, but these problems leave one wondering about the true purpose of the game.
Nour explicitly states that it does not have objectives in each vignette, but it does offer opportunity to explore. There does need to be more differentiation between certain levels and interactions that could add more depth to the title, though. As it stands, the game is however long you want it to be. It can take five minutes to cycle through all the vignettes, or it can take five hours depending on how much time you want to play with each dish. This isn’t inherently a bad thing – I’m a true believer that one can make a short and sweet title deserving of play. But some levels feel like you’re just throwing food around with no reason other than “because you can.” For example, there’s a vignette that’s just playing with donuts – at least that’s what it seems since there’s no real guidance about what you can actually do in each level. You can throw donuts around, slice them, burn them, food-color them and do all the other things desired. The vignette that takes place in a diner is also just food at a diner – there weren’t enough contextual clues to know if there was more to do with this level. There are quite a few of these that just feel like you’re here to look at a vignette rather than playingwiththe vignette. I understand the desire for player freedom, but what makes gameplay like this successful is the addition of clear motives – motive being the driving force for “why” you do something, whereas the objective is a tangible goal to achieve.
The game doesn’t offer goals, but it is asking you to be motivated to find secrets – yet none of this is supported. Instead you have to stumble around at the dinner table trying to figure out what new thing you should attempt to do with the meal that hasn’t been done before. Stronger level design is seen in vignettes that offer unique interactions that feel satisfying. For example, vignettes with containers and interactive components felt stronger than those that were simply food – at one point the game provides a puzzle players can solve by getting an egg into a hole. Playing with a bowl of ramen felt like it had more layers than playing with donuts or burgers. The final vignette that’s an interactive bill is unique and fun as I rang up thousands of dollars worth of food that would force me to dine and dash. Yet these handful of interactions unfortunately don’t provide enough depth. It isn’t until after the last vignette is finished that you’re treated to a post-game tutorial that gives important context. This is meant to entice players in to replayability, but this tutorial still doesn’t offer straightforward guidance – instead it’s more of a tutorial about how to get a cute, hungry jellyfish to appear in each level and it reminds you to try different inputs. Nour is gorgeous and does offer entertainment value, yet beyond the first handful of vignettes I’m left wondering what more I can do when the game doesn’t tell me much.
Closing Comments:
Nour: Play with Your Food is a deliciously-vibrant smorgasbord of physics-based interactions. It’s a title that features lovely design compositions and aesthetic elements to induce all the senses. In a series of vignettes, players work their way through a twenty-course meal that includes a gorgeous variety of foods and drinks to play with. Nour teaches you that the simple act of playing with your food can be joyful and as complex as you want it to be – what matters is the freedom of expression. The title does not wish to disrupt these themes and offers minimal tutorials and guidance about how to interact with each vignette. The beauty is that you get to decide how you play with your food. Objectiveless gaming creates low-pressure gameplay that puts control in the players' hands to explore and experiment as much as they want. The point of Nour is to take a tour through an ambient, virtual food gallery. And while the idea of Nour: Play with Your Food is tantalizing and spectacular, its execution crumbles as inconsistencies create difficult gameplay. There are distinct lack of gameplay tutorials that would be helpful to learn controls – with some tutorials feeling unfinished on mouse and keyboard. The UI can feel clunky and messy when you try to navigate some of these controls since there are inconsistencies in perspectives and effects shown on screen. The musical mechanics feel unpolished as well due to a combination of messy audio mixing and gameplay design. The title would be deserving of a higher score if it had more accessible play, but currently Nour has more variety in themes than in play which makes it feel like it lacks substance. Yet the developers at Terrifying Jellyfish should be praised for creating an aesthetically-pleasing atmospheric title that still offers entertainment value in sitting down and making a glorious mess.
