Food-battling strategy game ponders the ethics of culinary combat

pcgamesn.com:

Pretty much anyone can boil an egg, and at a stretch you might even be able to whisk one up and fry it into a delicious omelette. But what happens when you send that omelette into battle against a three-layered cake? That’s one of many questions posed by GladiEATers – so PCGamesN caught up with the mind behind this upcoming turn-based strategy game at WASD 2023 to ask him about Steam Early Access plans, the ethics of culinary combat, and the unquestionable potential of cheese.

The concept of GladiEATers is pretty simple – you cook up various foods and then send them to fight your opponent’s creations. You can bash out simple foods like boiled eggs quickly, or take time to cook something fancier (and stronger in battle) like a three-layered cake. It’s a simple but delightful concept that developer Oliver Georgallis from Milk Bubbles Games came up with on a long drive.

“It was complete silence that was broken by, ‘Tommy, I’ve got this idea okay?’” Upon telling his friend, the response all but confirmed the idea in Georgallis’s head: “It could be called GladiEATers.” He loved the name so much that ‘Tommy’ still holds a small stake in the game just for those naming rights. “I love puns – a lot of things in the game are named after puns,” Georgallis tells us on the WASD show floor.

“The team pulls me back on that a lot,” he muses, “For example, there’s only one combat chef in the game that can speak in puns, because everyone else said, alright Oliver, all the others need to speak normally.” Georgallis says the team wants the characters to feel varied and interesting, however, and each has their own specific dietary preferences, such as one who’s a raw paleo vegan.

“That’s never really a point of humour, you know – no-one ever