If you’re fond of crispy South Indian cooking, JRPG-style road-trips that take you from village to village, older female protagonists, turn-based combat with a healthy garnish of QTEs, slapstick satire, and food-themed reinventions of familiar mechanics… you have probably already wishlisted, bookmarked or otherwise made preparations to buy Dosa Divas, the next game from Thirsty Suitors developers Outerloop.
In this low-angle diorama-style fantasy, you play Samara and Amani, two wandering chefs who are fighting a fast food corporation run by their estranged sister Lina. Samara and Amani travel and battle by way of their “spirit mech”, Goddess, an ambulatory LEGO forklift in optional oven mitts, whose tricks include clubbing enemies with her own unplugged leg, and whipping up fresh dosas from gathered ingredients in a sort of culinary mind palace.
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Cooking is the game’s Gundam reactor core. It’s how you’ll win over non-player characters who’ve succumbed to mind-dulling liquid foods, and it’s how you’ll overwhelm Lina’s slimy, briefcase-wielding thugs. They don’t have elemental weaknesses. Rather, they are susceptible to certain flavours. Swat them right in the tastebuds, and they’ll melt before you like clueless white Englishmen trying their first four-foot jumbo at Chennai Srilalitha in Harrow, London. (This post was not sponsored by Chennai Srilalitha, but I dare to dream. I’m always open to offers, even if they aren’t four feet long. Call me.)
Samara, Amani, and Lina all used to work at the same locally owned restaurant, the eponymous Dosa Divas, but then they had an argument, and Lina went away for 10 years and caught Scrooge McDuck Syndrome, returning to grow the family business into a corporation. As with Thirsty Suitors, this is an overt and chewy piece of social commentary, exploring the usurpation of communal cooking and eating by mass-produced ready meals. “For us, it’s a very anti-capitalist story that we want to try to tell,” studio director and co-founder Chandana Ekanayake explains to me following a quick hands-on. “The idea that people don’t cook anymore, and try to bring food back as a way to way to connect again.
“Our last game Thirsty Suitors – there’s a lot of family dynamics and drama, and there’s resolution through battle and reconciliation,” they go on. “And that’s sort of the kind of the stories we like to tell. And food is always a big part of that, from a specific cultural perspective, and also, as a way to bond and connect with family.” The game’s journey between villages – by way of simple platforming routes laced with fishing spots, treasures and avoidable battles – hinges on composing flavour profiles requested by suffering locals, and butting heads with estranged colleagues. “Eventually you will face off against people that work for Lina who are your former co-workers in the restaurant,” Ekanayake adds. “Including your parents.”
Ekanayake calls Dosa Divas a “weird hybrid RPG”, but it seems less divided than Thirsty Suitors, a game that often felt like three travelling in parallel – skateboarding, turn-based combat and rhythm cooking minigame. “Games when you start [making them] they’re usually like, oh, this system, this system, this system – and then we try to find ways for the narrative and the gameplay to connect as much as possible,” Ekanayake notes. “That’s what every game really is about. It can seem like these systems obviously work together – it never starts that way.
“And sometimes you’re successful as a developer, and sometimes you don’t really get that until you ship the game, and have time to reflect on it,” they continue. “With Thirsty, we kind of got there, but not everything quite worked. Here, because we’re starting from the same team and same tools, we knew what worked and what didn’t – we could iterate on that faster. We have a team of 14 on initial development, so it’s being able to start from a place of having that experience, with all those people together.”
I like Dosa Divas most right now for its Paper Mariobrained battles, which have the same improv energy you find in Thirsty Suitors, but feel more of a piece with the bumpy, colourful countryside setting. Weapons include pans, spatulas, and piquant balls of fire, with button prompts to increase or negate damage. Each move is an animated skit, sometimes a full cinematic; nobody ever does anything as pedestrian as whopping the other side with a sword. When idle, characters bounce to the music in scenes that have me thinking wistfully of Wakka wiping his nose a million times per brawl in FFX.
Aside from poking your opponent’s gastronomic vulnerabilities, you can spend finite points to enhance a character’s moves, which helps cushion you against the effects of fudging the QTEs without letting you brute-force the system. The mechanics aren’t that novel beyond the cook-off theme, but there’s a confidence to the knitting of systems I greatly enjoy. I’m not sure if the demo section was from midway through, but between the three leads, their skills and the assorted power-up systems, the game also laid more options at my feet than you get to begin with in Thirsty Suitors. It’s more charismatic for the fact that so many of the items, abilities and quest goals involve or are derived from recipes. Dosa Divas may not actually teach you to cook, but it will certainly give you the urge.
Being a wizened oldster with many regrets, I also like the promise of a shorter playthrough by RPG standards. This obviously reflects the smaller team size, but is also a question of taste. “I grew up on a lot of, like, Final Fantasy 3 and 4,” Ekanayake told me. “I would like something a little tighter and shorter and with higher stakes. I feel like 80 hours or 100 hours is a long time to get to those story moments.” Indeed. Still, I don’t think I’d mind spending a few dozen hours chugging around the hillsides of Dosa Divas, swatting the suits with my skillet while mastering the mysteries of batter. It’s out in 2026, and you can read more on Steam.
