Game Theory: The Grim Lore of Cooking Companions

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 great, we can spend this time together just you and me how I did it was perfect now we really can be just us and look dinner is already served hello internet welcome to

game

theory

the program that is part of a balanced diet from youtube you have your history of mathematical science and cannibalism, that's right friends, it's the return of the weekend cannibalism crusader because nothing says brand-safe online content like talking about proper nutrition when we're stuck in a situation where the only source of food is human flesh last year around this time we did a three-way collaboration with channels where each talked about cannibalism in a unique way and this year we're bringing it back to food

theory

, we're learning which clues you can safely eat before having to resort to nibbling on a knee and more in movie theory .

Well okay it's just a two way cross between

game

theory and food theory the timing of the cannibalism episode didn't work in film theory and I really wanted to talk about the back rooms okay I just couldn't resist me that sweet sweet tradition anyway that food theory about eating clothes was largely inspired by the game we're talking about today Cooking Companions a visual novel style game produced by Deer Dream Studios a team that saw the Doki Doki literature club and said, "Hold my carving knife." I don't know what it is about these games that keeps drawing me in, I mean maybe it's the fun characters or the really cute anime art style or the uh oh yeah, that's definitely the scary hidden

lore

and

cooking

companions

have a

lore

.

Intriguing 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 to survive. That alone would be pretty bleak, but we're slowly starting to see clues. 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 hint that this same scenario has been repeated thousands of times before so who are we really? What horrors have happened inside this cabin and seriously, why are we being harassed by a team of talking vegetables?

I mentioned that right, the talking vegetables, no, yes, that exists too, so I hope you're hungry because I have some freshly carved history ready to serve. first, since this game has been criminally underrated on youtube, let me catch you up like most visual novels. You play as the unseen protagonist and start the game in a cabin with your four friends, innocent Mariah, Anxious, Anatoly, Compassionate, Gregor and Karen, who was Karen last time. I was here I asked for an almond shape an almond an almond shape and I have something else so if you do what I asked that would be great, it seems that you have gotten lost and found this cabin to stay for a few nights while you regroup and make us chef From the group In a true dating sim, 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 place. rooms at the right time you also find notes hidden in the bathroom or under the floor, but two days later things begin to take a turn, your rations run out and a storm arrives that prevents you from leaving the cabin and hunger quickly takes over of us.

Having nightmares describing horrible scenes Drowning Being cooked alive Hot pokers in the eyes with seemingly no hope of survival Mariah offers to swim through the flood waters in an effort to find help or food, but we all know the truth Say goodbye of her in tears When she leaves the cabin never to be seen again on completely unrelated news, we manage to find a new source of mystery meat, huh, oh, lucky me, I guess we're going to eat well tonight, but that meat mysterious can only last so long one by one. one, we lose people from the cabin, first anatoly and then gregor, leaving us alone with only karen, only karen, just kidding, who really likes the whole eating human flesh thing.

Fun fact, this is actually something that real world scientists have observed in cannibals, not something chemically in the meat, but it is high, the euphoria they get from doing something they know is wrong on a deeply human level, which It becomes addictive, kind of like Pringles, once you break out, the cannibalism doesn't stop as the days get longer and the cabin becomes haunted by foods from our past all the time while Karen starts to look a little anxious and a little hungry so we end up locking her in the basement, eventually we think she has to be right and we go down to the basement but obviously she's not a classic girl tries to kill a boy boy draws a reverse card steals the girl's knife and he sticks it in the chest at the end I more or less thought I had finished my game in gt live before I got to the final twist because I'm a big mental gamer Hey, okay guys, well there you have it.

I've been watching Marvel movies for years. There is always a post-credits scene. What was I thinking? Luckily, I went back and cleaned up some of the endings and it's at this point that we found it. Find out how our characters ended up in the cabin. Look. Turns out you were never part of the group. This is your cabin. Everyone else just ran into you when they got lost. The group explains their situation, but then you quote and ask the questions. I have asked thousands of times if you came of your own free will or were you sent when they say they come of their own free will but technically they were also sent we see they quoted the wrong answer wait sorry we asked this question.

Before it is a kind of time loop or we are all in purgatory and we keep having to relive this situation in order to find a solution in which we do not end up eating our friends, which is happening here and again there. There are vegetables called chompets that talk to you when no one else is around. You probably shouldn't overlook that little detail. There's also a nightmare mode and a new plus game and a mode that takes you directly to Cuphead. Sorry Sorry. What world do we live in here? It's clear there's a lot to unpack inside this thing, but it really comes down to two main mysteries.

The first is what actually happens inside the cabin. What's up with the mysterious notes? Nightmares Who are we? And what does the whole ending sequence about being sent versus free mean? The second main mystery has to do with chompats, those little anthropomorphized food friends that I keep mentioning but also avoiding because again there is so much to discuss, you would think they are just a figment of your adult cannibalism imagination, but they are so much more, so Let's start with the basics. Do we know who these people are and what they are doing here when food starts to run out?

Mariah says this quote: We didn't eat a lot of bread and jam, but it's more than we had when we left Ukraine. No, obviously it's just a one-time comment, but if you max out your relationship with Mariah, she confesses that the situation at the cabin isn't as bad as before. they went to Ukraine since at this point you've basically run out of food and there's no chance of finding more, that's the whole statement, he goes on to quote that our village went crazy with hunger after rationing caused extreme parents to send sending their children to orphanages instead of letting them starve at home was terrible, absolutely terrible, in the end we decided we needed to escape so we stole supplies until we had enough for the trip to keep our spirits up.

Gregor described it as a vacation, although you don't normally face death on a vacation. Karen also mentions him again in the final battle repeatedly saying that he 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. None of this is to make light of the situation that is currently happening in Ukraine right now or, honestly, in Ukraine in the past. Unfortunately, this is a part of the world that has had to deal with many horrible and tragic events, some of which we are actually about to discuss as part of the context of this game.

It is purely a coincidence that the

cooking

companions

went out and just a few months later, the country is suddenly embroiled in a war. This is not meant to downplay anything that happens there. this video to talk about a cool new game with a very interesting story created 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 of the story that comes from that part . of the world and as a result I have developed a greater sense of appreciation for the people who are currently being affected by the terrible violent actions that are happening by making this video and sharing it with you.

I hope you can To take some of that away too, our hearts go out to everyone who has been affected, all the families who have been displaced or torn apart, so if anything in this video inspires you to help people in that region of the world, we link to relevant charities. Down in the description they are currently helping the refugees get back into the game, although 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. parts that come in the form of handwritten. notes that you can only gain access by exploring the right rooms on the right days and clicking certain interaction options multiple times, it's not easy to find these things, but when you do find them, two mention zakopane, a small polish town about 186 miles away or 300 kilometers from the Ukrainian border we also received more location clues thanks to the game's appetizer edition, a standalone cooking buddy experience released a few months before the main title.

In it, the chompats quiz you on general trivia, all with hints of that. sweet, sweet tradition, one of the questions, for example, asks us where we are and the correct answer turns out to be the tetris mountains, a forested mountain range located between poland and slovakia and, although you may not know it, just north of the mountains of tetris is none other than the small town of zakopane combine that with mariah's comments about the need to escape from ukraine and it seems very clear that mariah gregor anatoly and karen are ukrainian refugees but refugees from what if you follow the romantic line Anatoly's instead of Mariah's, do you end up learning? that his dog died when he was six years old, this dog apparently meant a lot to his father, as he helped him find food during the war, obviously, there are many wars, so which one could he be talking about?

Well, it seems to be world war. As you see, in the extras menu we are told that Anatoly is 25 years old. Since World War I took place between 1914 and 1918, that would mean that the game probably takes place between 1933 and 1937 and this all lines up with a very real and very tragic event. in Ukrainian history known as Holodomor Helotomor is a famine that took place in Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. Its name is a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hollowed-out famine and further extermination and was as brutal as Mariah crudely describes it. We oversimplify events here.

Dictator Joseph Stalin aggressively seized control of peasants' agricultural lands and personal property to be controlled by the communist Soviet government. This collectivization movement failed due to government disorganization that destroyed rural economies and caused massive food shortages around the world. country when peasants began to rebel against these policies in Ukraine, especially in provinces that had previously fought the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, Stalin decided it was time to crack down and assert control by creating blacklists of cities that The government-controlled food police were also sent to raid homes and take anything edible, crops, personal food supplies, pets.

In the end, at least 5 million people died of starvation as a result of the great famine, at least 3.9 million of whom were Ukrainians and much like ours. characters from fellow chefs the food situation got so bad that people had to resort to cannibalism to survive. A doctor wrote in 1933 that he had not yet become a cannibal, but he was not sure that I was not one whenI wrote my letter. You get the good people died first those who refused to steal or prostitute themselves died those who gave food to others died those who refused to eat corpses died those who refused to kill their fellow men died the parents who resisted cannibalism died before Their children ended their date, so it seems that our four friends in the cabin are refugees fleeing the helotomor horrors that are happening in the Soviet states, but that leaves the question of who we are.

Well, let's think about what we know about our character. a cannibal who lives in a cabin in the forested mountains of Poland and Slovakia. We also know that we are ugly to look at. If our four companions' reaction to us when we first arrived is anything to go by during that twisted ending, we asked this too. A really random and very specific question about free will versus free will that apparently has a right and wrong answer, so I started with that very specific question and immediately got information about a supernatural being called baba yaga, a character from Slavic folklore, like this You are in the right part of the world and you live in a remote cabin.

Again, she is often described as an old hag with a deformed appearance, just like our hideous appearance in the game, which is also known to cannibalize visitors to her house, ladies and gentlemen, we have a bingo and here is the trick. Baba Yaga is known for asking that specific question about free will versus smell, apparently the correct answer is: I am here 75 of my own free will 65 by compulsion, which if you do the math totals up to 140 percent, so I don't know, maybe she needs some math classes in addition to the chewing bets that cooking classes teach her, in fact the more you watch the game the more we find that it connects us back to slime.

Yaga sometimes his cabin stands on chicken legs and would you know it, but we can find a chicken bone in the bedroom under the floorboards like a little Easter egg. Going back to that original story, not only that, but Karen is actually designed to look a lot like someone else. character from slavic folklore vasalisa the beautiful a girl who finds baba yaga in the forest during her own story even our nightmares between game days point to stories involving baba yaga the second dream we have about being pushed into an oven follows from close the Russian folktale Ivanuska where a boy refuses to be cooked in Baba Yaga's oven and instead tricks her into showing him how to trap her in the oven and cook her alive, so there you have it, we are Baba Yaga, a cannibal who feasts on those who are lost. in the woods and our latest victims are a hapless group of refugees fleeing a famine in their home country, except that's still not the whole story in kitchen buddy nightmare mode, we get this line, you lost more of your humanity , they actually use it. several times, but if we simply lost some of our humanity, that implies that we had humanity to begin with, we are not just an evil supernatural force, we are humans possessed by a supernatural force and the game seems to support this. after mariah leaves the cabin we dream about desecrating a corpse then we wake up in a different room than the one we fell asleep having some kind of mysterious meat this happens again when anatoly leaves the cabin we dream about putting his glasses aside and cut it off we suddenly wake up with more meat the game explicitly tells you on some occasions that you have been sleepwalking which the chompet potato confirms in more detail date in the first week with the redhead and the others where you slept yes I can be honest, it was really horrible witnessing you collapse in the middle of the hallway, sleepwalk against the walls or, worse yet, go down to the basement.

This proves that our non-folk dreams, the ones where we cut people up, were not only real. but it happened while we were sleeping, we did not have full control of our actions and something keeps us alive beyond normal. The trumpets seem to believe that if they kill you, Karen will take over the cabin, implying the spirit of Baba Yaga. It can be passed from person to person to protect the cabin and the spirits that reside in it, which leaves us with one last question: how did we end up with Baba Yaga's power if we were potentially going to pass it on to Karen?

If we lost the final battle, wouldn't it make sense that we won it from someone before us? Fear not, dear theorists, because I'm pretty sure I know how we got here, and it has a lot to do with what's most important. iconic characters from the franchise characters you'll notice I haven't mentioned much yet today. I'm talking, of course, about chompats more specifically. I think the potato is the key to putting all this together. She feels like the outsider. of the group that does not want to participate in the other trumpet games, he knows a lot about the caloric needs of the human body and gives off strong killer vibes, let's call it a hunch or maybe the fact that he explicitly gives us a secret recipe. called slaughter stew, could it have been the previous baba yaga?

The answer to that question will have to wait until part two. I know it's frustrating, but bite bets come with a lot of mysteries that deserve a whole episode, so why not? You hit the subscribe button and stab the notification bell to make sure you don't miss that video when it comes out in a few weeks because some foods are just better cooked long and slow and hey, while you're waiting, click for our new food theory coming up. came up literally right now, where we talk more about cooking buddies or, I guess, more accurately, how to avoid becoming a cooking buddy.

Could you instead eat your clothes the next time you say you're going to eat your hats? Can you make boot soup? What about crocodiles? I heard those things are edible. The link is on the screen right now, so if you're hungry for more, that episode should entertain you very well, and as always, my friends remember that it's all just a theory, a game theory. thanks for watching