Today Wonderbelly announces our next game, Arcane Eats! It’s a roguelike deckbuilder with a delicious twist – build a cuisine-themed deck of cards, cook up combos on magical cooktops, and serve fantastical meals to hordes of hungry monsters. It’s crisp and crunchy card play tossed in roguelike spices with a heaping side of culinary puns.
I’m a big foodie and I love games about cooking, but I’ve always felt like there’s something missing. Most cooking games focus on following recipes and speedy execution. Cooking can be about that for sure, but the kind of cooking I love most happens when you let go of following a recipe – when you improvise with the ingredients you have at hand, when you experiment to find new taste combos, when you try to understand the underlying mechanics so you can make your prep work even more efficient or your dish even more delicious. Cooking like that is exciting, it’s clever, and it’s risky – sometimes you fail! And also, it sounds a lot like a roguelike, doesn’t it? Stir that together with my everlasting love of nerdy card games, and you’ve got the flavorful foundation that came together to make Arcane Eats.
I can get into the weeds talking about cooking – it’s dear to my belly – and from soup to nuts, this game is thoroughly infused with cooking themes. But make no mistake, Arcane Eats is a deep and strategic deckbuilder at its heart. We’ve drawn inspiration from some of our favorites, like Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone, so if you like the taste of those games, you’ll find plenty here to sink your teeth into.
We’ve been simmering in secrecy for more than a year waiting to tell you all about Arcane Eats, and I’m so excited we finally get to share! Now that we’ve announced, we’ll be handing out info appetizers more regularly, so don’t forget to join our newsletter and we’ll keep you fed. And of course, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys a seat at the chef’s table, chatting with us as we work and maybe getting a chance to be a taste *tester*, please please come join us in our new Arcane Eats channel on our Discord server! We’re hanging out there all the time, and we’d love to hear which fantasy monsters are on the top of your bucket list to make into meals.
Oh, and don’t forget to wishlist Arcane Eats!
Flavorfully yours,
Andrea at Wonderbelly Games
P.S. We put our last game, Roundguard, on a deep discount to celebrate! It’s a peggle-like roguelike full of cheeky fantasy and bouncy physics and you can check it out here: