Video game food: more than just some extra health

destructoid.com:

Food. It’s one of the most quintessential parts of being alive, so it only makes sense that we would find a way to include it in a medium like video games that often tries to replicate real life.

Ever since the early days of gaming, food has been a way to get health or energy back. The first thing that comes to mind when I think about video game food has to be the meat you find in the walls of a spooky castle in Castlevania, or the hilariously anachronistic gyro and fries you can pick up in Hades. It’s something that can seem really silly on the face of it, and the way we use food for health in video games has been memed and parodied to death. Admittedly, it is very funny to imagine your character in a game stopping in the middle of a scuffle to shove fourteen wheels of cheese into their face before diving back into the fight.

But when you think about it, is there any other analogy that works better? I don’t think so. Food is our fuel, it’s what gives us energy to do the things we need to do — a simple, given fact of life that is still somehow easy for me to forget on an almost daily basis.

While food remains an important mechanic to most games out there, we also have games that place their entire focus on food. Take the classic and beloved Cooking Mama series for example — there’s literally nothing else to do in those games except make food. You’d think it would get too repetitive or boring after a while, but Mama always finds new ways to keep it just as interesting and challenging as trying to make food in real life.

As someone who has had varied success on their journey to learn new recipes and make nutritious-enough food so as not to drop dead one day as an adult fending for myself, it’s interesting to have games