Game Theory - The Grim Lore of Cooking Companions

Episode Date: April 16, 2023

Theorists, not since Doki Doki Literature Club have I seen a game that makes me scared the cute character is going to come out of the computer and get me. Welcome to Cooking Companions, the sweet-looking cooking game that is hiding some unimaginable horrors. You'll have to grab a snack and watch to find out what secrets I've uncovered. Be careful though, you never know what may be hiding in your food.

Hello again. It's been so long. Did you miss me? Because I definitely missed you. I've been watching you, you know, through the screen. Watching you do things. Don't be shy. It's okay. I'm here for you. It's so great we get to spend this time together, just you and... How did I do? Was it perfect? Now it really can be just as... And look, dinner's all ready soon. Oh, internet? Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's part of a balanced YouTube diet. You've got your math, science, history, lore, and cannibalism. Largely inspired by the game we're talking about today. Cooking Companions. A visual novel style game produced by Dear Dream Studios,

a team that saw dokey-toki literature club and said, Hold My Carving Knife. I don't know what it is about these games that keeps drawn me in. I mean, maybe it's the fun characters, or the really cute anime art style, or the, uh... Oh, yep, that... one, it's definitely the scary hidden lore. And boy, does cooking companions have lore intrigue for days. On the surface, it appears to be a story of five characters trapped in a remote cabin with no supplies,

eventually forced to turn on each other in order to survive. Now, that alone would be pretty darn bleak, but bit by bit, we start seeing hints to an even darker backstory. Secret notes in the bathroom, locked doors in the basement, bones under the floorboards, nightmares that suggest the sins of our past. And hints that this same scenario has played out thousands of times. before. So who are we really? What horrors have happened inside this cabin? And seriously, why are we being stalked by a team of talking vegetables? I mentioned that one, right? The talking vegetables? No? Yeah, that's a thing too. So I hope you're hungry because I've got some freshly carved lore already to serve up. First, since this game has been criminally underplayed on YouTube, let me catch you up. Like most

visual novels, you play as the unseen protagonist, and you start the game in a cabin with your four friends, innocent Mariah, Eager, Anatoly, compassionate Gregor, and Karen. Who's a Karen? Last time I was in here, I asked for an almond shape. An almond shape, and I got something else. So if you just do what I ask, that would be great. It appears that you've gotten lost, and you found this cabin to stay in for a few nights as you regroup. And we are named a chef of the group.

In true dating some form, you spend your first few days exploring the cabin and interacting with the characters to build relationships, learning more about their unique backstories as you go. By choosing to visit the right rooms at the right times, you also find hidden notes in the bathroom or under floorboards. But two days in, things start to take a turn. Your rations run out and a storm rolls in that prevents you from leaving the cabin. With starvation very quickly setting in, we begin to have nightmares describing horrifying scenes. Drowning, being cooked alive, hot poker's in the eye. With seemingly no hope of survival, Mariah offers to swim through the floodwaters in an effort to find help or food.

But we all know the truth. You have a tearful goodbye with her as she leaves the cabin, never to be seen again. In completely unrelated news, we managed to find ourselves a new source of mystery meat. Ha, how lucky! Guess we're going to be eaten good night, but that mystery meat can only last for so long. One by one, we lose people from the cabin. First Anatoly and then Gregor, leaving us alone with just Karen. Just Karen.

Just Karen. Just Karen. Who really takes a liking to the whole eating human flesh thing. Fun fact, this is actually something that real world scientists have observed in cannibals. It's not something chemically in the meat, but it's a high. The euphoria that they get from doing something that they know is wrong on a deeply human level that becomes addictive. Kind of like Pringles. Once you pop, the cannibalism don't stop. As the days drag on, the cabin becomes haunted by the meals of our past. All the while, Karen starts looking

a bit too eager and a bit too hungry. So we end up locking her in the basement. Eventually, we're like, she's got to be dead, right? And we go down into the basement, but obviously she's not. Classic girl tries to kill boy, boy pulls an Uno reverse card, steals girl's knife, and plunges it into her chest. The end. Or so I thought. I actually finished my playthrough on GT Live before getting to the final twist because I am a big brain gamer. Huh. All right friends. Well, there you have it. I've been watching Marvel movies for years. There's always a post-credit scene. What was I thinking? Anyway, fortunately I did go back and clean up some of the endings and it's at this point that we

find out how our characters actually wound up in the cabin. See, it turns out that you were never part of the group. This is your cabin. All the others just stumbled across you when they got lost. The group explains their situation, but then you, quote, ask the questions you've asked thousands of times, did you come on your own free will or were you sent? When they say that they come on their own free will, but were also technically sent, we see that they, quote, answered incorrectly. Wait, sorry, what? We've asked this question before? Is this some sort of a time loop? Are we all in purgatory and keep having to relive this situation in order to, you know, find a solution where we don't end up eating our friends? What is going on here?

Oh, and again, there are vegetables called the chompats that talk to you when no one else is around. Probably shouldn't overlook that little detail. There's also a nightmare mode and a new game plus. And a mode that drops you straight in the cup head. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What? What? What world are we living in here? Okay, there's clearly a lot.

to unpack inside of this thing, but it really boils down to two main mysteries. The first is what's actually going on inside the cabin. What's up with the mysterious notes, the nightmares, who are we, and what does the whole ending sequence about being sent versus free will mean? The second main mystery has to do with the chompets, those little anthropomorphized food friends that I keep bringing up but also avoiding, because again, there's a lot there to discuss. You'd think that they're just figments of your cannibalism addled imagination, but they are so much more. So let's start with the basic, shall we? Who these people are, and what they're doing here.

When the food starts to run out, Mariah says this, quote, "'Bread and jam isn't much of a meal, but it's more than we had when we left Ukraine.'" Now, obviously, that's just a one-off comment. But if you max out your relationship with Mariah, she confesses that the situation in the cabin isn't nearly as bad as what they left in the Ukraine. Given at this point you've basically run out of food

with no chance of finding more, that is quite the statement. She continues, quote, "'Our village went mad from starvation after the rationing got extreme. Parents sending their children to orphanages instead of letting them starve at home. It was terrible, absolutely terrible.

Eventually, we decided we needed to escape, so we stole supplies until we had enough for the journey to keep our spirits up. Gregor described it as a vacation. You don't usually face death during a vacation, though. It also gets brought up by Karen again in the final battle, saying repeatedly that she should have never left Ukraine. And it's at this point that I'd like to mention the giant elephant in the room. While yes, I'm making jokes about cannibalism and this game,

none of it is to make light of the situation that's currently happening over in the Ukraine right now, or honestly, Ukraine in the past. Sadly, this is a part of the world that's had to deal with a lot of horrific and tragic events, some of which were actually about to discuss as part of the context for this game. It is pure coincidence that cooking companions came out, and only months later, the country is now suddenly embroiled in war. This is not meant to make light of anything happening there. I'm making this video to talk about a cool new game with very interesting lore

made by a team of passionate creators who made something that I just want more people to know about. And thanks to their game, I became more aware of the folklore and history, coming from that part of the world. And as a result, I've grown a greater sense of appreciation for the people that are currently being affected by the terrible violent actions that are happening. In making this video and sharing it with you,

I'm hopeful that you're able to take away some of that too. Our hearts are with everyone who's been affected. All the families that have been displaced or torn apart. Back to the game, though, it's also worth noting that Ukraine isn't the only real-world location mentioned. Like any good indie horror title, there are hidden clues scattered throughout, which come in the form of handwritten notes

that you can only have access to by exploring the right rooms on the right days and by clicking certain interact options multiple times. It is not easy to find this stuff. But when you do find them, two mention Zacopane, a little Polish town about 186 miles or 300 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. We also get more location hints thanks to the appetizer edition of the game. A standalone cooking companion's experience released a few months prior to the main title. In it, you get quizzed by the Chompets on general trivia, all with hints of that sweet, sweet lore.

One of the questions, for instance, asks us where we are. And the correct answer turns out to be the Tatris Mountains, a forested mountain range that sits between Poland and Slovakia. And wouldn't you know it, but just north of the Tatris Mountains, is none other than the little town of Zakopane. Combined that with Mariah's comments about needing to escape from Ukraine, and it seems very clear that Mariah, Greger, Anatoly, and Karen are Ukrainian refugees. But refugees of what?

If you follow Anatoly's Romance line instead of Marias, you end up learning that his dog died when he was six. This dog apparently meant a lot to his father as it helped him find food during, quote, the war. Obviously, there are a lot of wars, so which one could he possibly be talking about? Well, it appears to be World War I. See, we're told in the extras menu that Anatolia's 25. With World War I being between 1914 and 1918, that would mean the game likely takes place between 1933 and 1937. And all of this lines up with the very real, very tragic event in the history of Ukraine, known as Holodomor.

Helodomor is a famine that took place in Soviet Ukraine between Noghomor. 1932 and 1933. Its name is a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger, Hulud, and extermination, more. And it was just as brutal as Mariah describes. To grossly oversimplify the events here, dictator Joseph Stalin aggressively seized control of the farmland and personal property of peasants in order for it to be controlled by the communist Soviet government. This collectivization movement failed to do to government disorganization, which destroyed rural economies and led to massive food shortages across the country. When peasants start

started to rebel against these policies in Ukraine, especially in provinces that had previously fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, Stalin decided it was time to crack down and assert control by creating black lists of towns that wouldn't receive the government-controlled food. Police were also sent to ransack homes and take anything that was edible. Crops, personal food supplies, pets. In the end, at least 5 million people died of hunger resulting from the Great Famine. At least 3.9 million of which were Ukrainian. And much like our characters in cooking companions, the food situation got so bad that people had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. A doctor wrote in 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was, quote,

Not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you. The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did, end quote. So it seems like our four kids.

cabin friends are refugees running away from the Hologamore horrors that are happening over in the Soviet states. But that then leaves the question of, who are we? Well, let's just think about what we do know about our character. We're a cannibal that lives in some cabin in the forested mountains of Poland and Slovakia. We also know that we're hideous to look at, if our four companions' reaction to us when we first arrive is anything to go by during that twist ending. We also ask this really random, really specific question about free will versus being sent that apparently has itself a right and wrong answer. So, I started there with that very specific question and immediately got back information on a supernatural being called the Baba Yaga. A character from Slavic folklore, so we're in the right part of the world, who lives in a remote cabin, check again, often described as an old hag with a deformed appearance.

Again, just like our hideous appearance in the game. She's also known to cannibalize the visitors to her home. Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a bingo. And here's the kicker. Baba Yaga is known for asking that specific free will versus scent question. The correct answer for that is, I am here 75% of my own free will, 65% by compulsion, which if you do the math totals up to 140%, so I don't know, maybe she needs some math classes in addition to the chompets teaching her cooking classes.

In fact, the more you look at the game, the more we find connecting us back to Baba Yaga. Sometimes her cabin stands on chicken legs, and when you know it, but we can find a chicken bone in the bedroom underneath the floorboards as a little Easter egg back to that original story. Not only that, but Karen is actually designed to look very sensitive. similar to another character from Slavic folklore, Vasalisa the Beautiful, a girl that finds Baba Yaga in the woods during her own story. Even our nightmares between days of the game point to stories that involve the Baba Yaga. The second dream we get about being shoved into an oven closely follows the Russian folktale

Ivanushka, where a boy refuses to be cooked in Baba Yaga's oven and instead tricks her into showing him how, trapping her in the oven and cooking her alive. So there you have it, we are the Babiaga, a cannibal that feasts on those that are lost in the woods. Our latest victims are an unlucky group of refugees running away from a famine in their home country. Except it's still not quite the whole story. In nightmare mode of cooking companions, we get this line, you lost more of your humanity. They actually use it multiple times.

But if we just lost some of our humanity, that then implies that we had humanity to start off with, right? We're not just some evil supernatural force. We're a human possessed by a supernatural force. And the game seems to back this up. After Mariah leaves the cabin, we have a dream about desecrating a corpse. Then we wake up in a different room than when we fell asleep having some sort of mystery meat. This happens again when Anatoly leaves the cabin. We dream about putting his glasses aside and cutting him up.

Suddenly, we wake up with more meat. The game tells you explicitly on a few occasions that you've been sleepwalking, with the chompette potato confirms in more detail, quote, In the first week with the red-haired woman and the others, where did you sleep? If I can be honest, it was truly horrific to witness. You would routinely collapse in the middle of the hallway, sleepwalking into walls, or worse, going down into the basement.

This proves that our non-folklore dreams, the ones where we chop people up, were not only real, but happening while we were asleep. We weren't fully in control of our actions, and something is keeping us alive beyond what's normal. The chop bets do seem to believe that if you're killed, Karen will take over the cabin, implying that the spirit of Baba Yaga can be passed from person to person, in order to protect the cabin and the spirits that reside in it. So that just leaves us with one final question.

How did we end up with the power of Baba Yaga? If we were potentially going to pass it on to Karen if we lost the final battle, then wouldn't it make sense for us to have gained it from someone before us? Well, fear not, dear theorists, because I'm pretty confident that I know how we got here. And it has everything to do with the most iconic characters from the franchise. Characters that you'll notice, I still really haven't mentioned all that much today.

I'm talking, of course, about the chompets. More specifically, I think potato is the key putting this whole thing together. It feels like the odd one of the group, not wanting to participate in the other Chompets games. He knows a lot about the caloric needs of the human body, and he gives off some strong murder vibes. Let's just call it a hunch, or maybe the fact that he gives us a secret recipe explicitly called slaughter stew. In total, we have ourselves five key members of the Chompets. Cabbage, leader of the group who likes to organize games for the others to play. Onion, the comedian, though not sure calling us stinky over and over again is actually that funny.

Bread, the lover of puns, the vaguely threatening raspberry, and the grumpy, non-participatory potato. There's also frequent references to a missing sixth chompet cornbread but he's not around anymore. Throughout the game these guys pop in to make jokes, unlock new recipes, and generally comment on your declining mental stability. So are they real or are they just figments of your imagination? Even the player character asks this question the first time we encounter them in the game and the answer is unclear at best. No one else seems to see them and when we begin to pass out towards the end of the game the characters seem to phase in and out of

existence. Feels pretty obvious that we're just going mad, right? Then again, they can also keep drawers shut, slam doors that have even made mouse holes to travel unseen throughout the cabin. Plus, we're told potato blocks those same mouse holes with rocks in New Game Plus, so they're not only able to move rocks, but also apparently can't pass through them. Well, the answer to what they really are seems to come at the end of that new game plus. After killing an enraged Karen down in the basement, we actually get a little cutscene that shows her lying on the ground, eyes widening as she dies, only for it to then cut to the chompets welcoming in a new vegetable turn-up to the group. Though this new chompet is labeled as a he,

the editing makes it very clear that it's meant to be Karen. But then why would she, of all the people, become a chompet as opposed to everyone else that we've seen die throughout the game? Mariah, Gregor, and Anatoly all die in the game, but they only haunt the cabinet's spirits. They don't form some new food group meant to chase us around, so what's going on here? Well, several times throughout the game,

Both the spirits of our dead companions and the chompets make mention that, quote, those who die in the cabin are bound by different rules. The rules are different for people that die in the cabin. The lucky ones are dead when cooked. The important word here is in the cabin. Earlier in the game, Mariah and Anatoly both leave the cabin in search of food. These moments are emphasized by a little jingle and the explicit words, character has left the cabin.

Pretty hard to deny what's going on in those moments. As for Gregor, our third companion, well, yes, he does die in the cabin, it isn't by our hand. He's been cut to pieces by Karen. Mariah Greger and Anatoly are haunting the cabin because of our guilt. But Karen died inside the cabin's basement from stab wounds we inflict, which is why she then becomes a chompet. This in turn suggests that all the other chompets must function the same way. Previous victims of the Babiaga also murdered within the confines of the cabin. During the hide-and-seek section of the story, we find Onion in the bedroom and he tells us this. I'm sorry to hear about Mariah

and Atali and Gregor. But yikes, that's three people gone in less than a month. Not as bad as five people in one night, though, right? Five deaths. Five chompets. Hmm, pieces seem like they're falling into place. We even get this line from Onion during the fight with Karen in the basement. Just finish this in one swift motion.

Like with Potato. We killed Potato in one move, something that Potato confirms during his ending. Looting it from my corpse and hiding it in a drawer. Murder and theft in one day. Wait, wait, what? His knife? So far we've seen cabbage refer to it as our knife, and we only ever asked Karen to give us back our knife, but it was originally potatoes?

This is where things really start to get interesting. I mentioned last time how potato really is the oddball of the group. While all the rest are willing to play along with Cabbage's games, Potato regularly stays silent, or else kills the moment with an offhanded comment, bringing everyone crashing back down to reality. In one of the game's many endings, he says that you should both leave the cabin to feast on all the people of local towns together. He also is the one that gives us the slaughter stew recipe, the only outright cannibalistic recipe in the game. On top of all of it, during one of his survival lessons, is an in-depth analysis of the Harris Benedict equation,

which calculates how people starve to death. You know, a totally normal, not serial killer-y thing to do it all. And if none of that was explicit enough, Potato even says, I wouldn't miss a killing for the world. This was his cabin. Potato was the Baba Yaga before us. Remember those notes that I've been mentioning from around the cabin? the ones that you can only get on certain days and certain places after multiple clicks.

Well, the last note we get tells us this. June 26, 1862. Another body of a child was discovered within the city of Zacopane, with the remains stuffed into a barrel full of potatoes. This marks the fourth victim by the butcher of Zacopane in less than a month. Potatoes, you say? Hmm? That's not the only connection to our good friend potato either.

During the Chompet cooking courses, another post-game mode made available after you get your first ending, While the others are reminiscing about school, Potato tells us that he dropped out of grade school so he could work at the butcher. To which bread replies, Explains everything so far. Potato was the butcher of Zacopane. As Onion says,

I wouldn't call it a change of heart, because he never really had one, potato. And we know we can't be the butcher. Based on another of the hidden notes inside of the game, we know the butcher was at one point summoned to court. But as Potato himself says, It's a shame you never went to trial for anything. But then, who are we?

How did we get involved in all this? While we were part of the original group of kids that become the chompets. During the final fight, Bread asks us a very interesting question during our fight with Karen. Why did we come here again? So that explains Potato. Notice the use of the word we. We were a part of the group with bread at some point. Potato, meanwhile, was an outsider.

In the appetizer preview edition of this game, you and Potato have a heart to heart, and he outright tells us this. I cornered the four in this basement room, and all of us ended up dead. Cabbage, onion. Raspberry bread. They're still afraid to enter this room. Too traumatized to come to grips with it.

Potato, as the butcher, was about to kill everyone. And you see, that's when you step in. In the main game, we have an opportunity to tell Karen about the chompets. And when we do, this is her response. A potato is killing people? They asked you to save them? What the heck does that even mean? In short, we killed the butcher of Zaku Pani with his own knife as he was killing our friends.

And in so doing, we got possessed and became the body. But how? For some reason, we weren't gathered into the basement like the others. We had the chance to kill the butcher when all the rest of our friends were helpless. So what made us so different? Well, I suspect that the butcher was training us to become like him. Throughout the game, we act as Karen's mentor, introducing her to the world of killing and cannibalism. We show her books about chopping people up and we get lines like, she's not ready yet. She is meant to become our cooking companion, at least until she gets a little bit too enthusiastic and turns on us. And I suspect that. that the butcher was training us up in a similar way. In our various conversations with Potato, there seems to be some level of friendship between our character and the killer. He asks us to go into the basement and... Put an end to this.

Not for the chompets. For me. We also get hints throughout New Game Plus's timeline that Karen and Potato would have made great partners in another life. Out of all of the kids that he planned to kill, we were singled out as special. We were meant to be his pupil. As you might imagine, being a one-man cannibal is a lonely life. Getting to share that with someone else, though?

priceless. But when our friends started getting killed, we had to act and slaughter the man who had taken us under his wing. Except what we didn't know is that that would force us to go on and continue the Baba Yaga's legacy moving forward. So, there you have it. The deep lore of cooking companions. Except there's one final layer to the story. One final chompet that we need to discuss. Cornbread. As I mentioned before, cornbread is the missing sixth chompet, one that we here mentioned a lot, but never really see until the game's final most secret ending. We know from in-game clues that cornbread's real name was Raziel and that they were related to onion. Being a chompette, we also know that presumably they were killed in the cabin and that we consumed their body. But there's something that makes cornbread different.

Unlike all the other chompets, we've let cornbread move on. During the end game of New Game Plus, Cabbage asks us if we'll let the chompets go, and we say no. Will you let us go? Someday, maybe. And it for some reason, we've allowed cornbread to pass on. Why? Well, we know at some point that we've actually seen. stopped killing. During the postgame, Potato asks us this. How many generations died brutally at your

hands before you gave up? Was it your arthritis that stopped you? Or did you eventually feel remorse? I think it was the latter. I think that we felt remorse. And it was cornbread that did it to us. Now, to be honest, based on this message that I found on Discord, I'm not even sure the creators of the game have fully mapped this out, but based on everything that I've seen inside of the game and everything that we covered so far, here's what I think happened. After the night where our friends die and we kill the butcher, we become possessed by the Babiaga. Some time passes. We're still in the cabin, alone and hungry. But then, a new child stumbles in. Someone we know, it's onions relative Raziel looking for his lost family member. We bring them in and they stay for a while, telling us countless

puns, just generally being fun and bringing joy to our otherwise lonely life. Razael gives us hope, shows us that there's no need for us to kill, that we can become normal again, but eventually the hunger sets in. It can't be quelled. It can't be stopped. We resist. We resists. We resists. We exist it, but at some point we succumb to the Baba Yaga's need. We kill Raziel in a moment of weakness. He wasn't meant to be there. He wasn't meant to die. We just couldn't help ourselves.

Out of regret and out of self-loathing, we eat him. We eat every last piece of him. And then we let him go because he was innocent, because he reminds us of our weakness, because we can't bear to keep him a prisoner. We let him move on, and we keep all the other chompets here with us. Too afraid to be left alone. We keep the rest of the chompets here because they don't come with the extra burden of guilt.

And so there you have... Oh, the developer just tagged us in a tweet. Wonder what this is about. A black image? You know what that means. Crank up the exposure, boys. A shadowy figure holding a knife with four people. Cabbage, raspberry,

onion, bread, and the shadow of potato. Beautiful. Chef's kiss. Now all we need is that cornbread origin story and we're all good. And with that, my friends, we put a wrap on the delicious lore of cooking companions. So remember, the next time you're at the store and the vegetables start talking to you, don't just tune them out. Give a listen.

might just have made your new best friend and eventually a salad. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.