The Snackbar at the End of the World puts you in a 1960s Italian kitchen, after fighting the ingredients

Snackbar Studio's hand-drawn adventure RPG has you foraging forbidden wilds for pasta ingredients that fight back, to pay your aunt's way out of jail. Its own site says 2027.

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Snackbar Studio has put its first game on Steam, and the premise is hard to beat. The store page for The Snackbar at the End of the World describes a hand-drawn narrative adventure RPG set in a magical 1960s Italy, where you take over a struggling family restaurant. Indie Games Plus reported on 10 November that the page went up alongside the game's first trailer.

Pasta, with a jailbreak

Your aunt has been arrested for foraging in the forbidden wilds beyond the city walls. To pay for her release you go out there yourself, gathering ingredients for that night's service and dealing with what lives there: explosive tomatoes, razor-sharp artichokes, chaotic zucchini and "vendetta-driven poultry". You can fight them or sneak past. The town's ruler, the Sindaco, wants the restaurant shut, so the local government is the other thing to avoid.

Back in the kitchen the cooking is a run of mini-games built on real recipes. The store page mentions tempering eggs for a carbonara and chopping tomatoes for bruschetta, and one screenshot shows a tomato being crushed into a pan beside a slab of cured pork. Between the two halves you upgrade your gear, the restaurant and the neighbourhood, across what the studio calls dozens of story quests.

Made by people, and saying so

The studio uses part of the store page to say the game is human-made: every asset and frame of animation hand-drawn, every line of text written by "our James-Beard-award-winning humorist", and every sound, note and line of code made by the team. The page explains why: the game is about human relationships and food, "and that's not a story we would ever trust AI to tell."

Steam lists Windows and says "Coming soon". The studio's own site is more specific and says the game is coming in 2027. There is no price yet; for now you can wishlist it.

Sources

Image: Image: Snackbar Studio

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