


The storylines of the different characters are woven together - for example, a young policeman mourns his wife while his father-in-law resents him as the two dine side by side. The customers who come into the diner all have unique personalities and preferences, and serving them dishes they like opens up conversations. There’s more to Hungry Hearts Diner than cooking and serving, though. Hungry Hearts Diner involves a wide selection of traditional Japanese food, going beyond well-known fare such as ramen and miso soup to less-familiar dishes like nikujaga and tonjiru, making the game a way to learn a little more about Japanese cuisine. Grandma’s menu starts out small - just rice balls, more or less - but the more that she cooks, the more types of dishes open up. Many games in the running-a-restaurant genre have a time component, but the customers in the Hungry Hearts Diner are happy to wait as long as it takes for the old woman running the place by herself to cook for and serve them. Grandma cooks a dish from the menu, customers come in to the diner and order it, and with a tap, they’re served.

The actual game play of Hungry Hearts Diner is simple. It doesn’t take a great knowledge of Japanese culture or cuisine to enjoy the mood of Hungry Hearts Diner everything is just a little slower, a little softer, a little more sepia-toned. The diner and its customers exist in an unspecified city in an unspecified year in the Showa period. This game follows the tale of a sweet little old grandma running a diner in Japan after her husband has fallen ill and is no longer able to operate it himself. Some, like Hungry Hearts Diner, are just there to make you feel relaxed and give you something pleasant to pass the time. Not all games are out to test your reflexes and skills. Hungry Hearts Diner Hungry Hearts Diner: A Tale of Star-Crossed Souls ( iOS/ Android) Here are three food-based mobile games that are worth the download. In the morass are a few actually good mobile games, those that stand out as unique, or, at the very least, interesting twists on a familiar formula. Pasta Maker is the same as Ramen Master is the same as Burger Shop, and they’re all boring and shameless grabs at money via in-app purchases.īut the situation is not completely hopeless. The app store seems like it’s got a cornucopia of cooking-based mobile games, but on closer examination, it’s mostly just a slimy stew of nearly identical restaurant management apps, all of them basically the same uninteresting gameplay with different coats of paint. Which is why it breaks my heart that finding good video games featuring food, like Final Fantasy XV and its beautiful road trip cuisine or Gordon Ramsay Dash’s mix of addictive gameplay and celebrity, can be as tedious and frustrating as shucking and peeling fava beans. I love video games, and I love food, and I love video games about food.
