Can virtual food look so good that you can taste it? Can visuals and sound alone evoke the sensation of hunger?
My name is Tj Hughes, I’m the solo founder of the colorful vibe-oriented indie studio Terrifying Jellyfish. It’s wild to be writing that Nour: Play With Your Food is coming to PS5!
Nour: Play With Your Food is an interactive exploration into the aesthetics of food and drink. Nour — as in nourish — refuses to adhere to traditional goals or objectives; you’re free to play with your food however you see fit, whether that be making a mess, or assembling the bowl of ramen of your dreams! Relive those childhood memories of fiddling with your food, without the all-too-real mess to clean up afterwards. Once you’ve created your in-game masterpiece, you can enter photo mode, and live out the food blogger’s dream, taking pictures and video of your dish for the scathing eyes of social media to judge!
What inspired such a project? The influences are super eclectic, ranging from Instagram food blogs, lovingly rendered anime food, and the experience of having bubble tea for the first time. These tastes were something that I had an insatiable need to express through art, so back in 2015 I started a side project. Being a fun little experiment to work in my spare time, I never could have guessed how excited people would get about the project. But it taught me something: food is universal, and is something that we all have strong memories of. This is a project that hopes to remind us of our food memories in a positive light. And also make 3D food look just as good as anime food. Seriously, how do animators draw food that well?
This game encourages you to experiment with its controls. No button is off limits! Press different combinations of buttons to interact with the game. Think outside the box and you just might discover a secret 😉 With 20+ food vignettes, and reactive musical compositions to accompany each, this is bound to be the tastiest multi-course meal to hit next-gen. We have major plans to take advantage of the new DualSense controller’s features. Imagine the satisfaction of cutting a virtual peach with a knife, the resistance being reflected by the controller’s adaptive triggers increasing in tension, and the glide of the knife being modeled through the controller’s haptic feedback. It’s the best thing since Instagram slime videos.
This is a project I’ve been working on for quite a while now, and I’m awed and excited to announce that Nour: Play With Your Food is being published by Panic. I’ve been a fan of the Portland-based company ever since Firewatch, and have followed them throughout the announcement of Playdate and Untitled Goose Game. If you told me years ago that I would be working with them, I for sure would’ve thought you were playing me; but alas here we are! So much love to Panic for believing in my unusual interactive food project and helping me bring it to fruition.
This game is a project that has brought me all over the globe through demo opportunities and art exhibitions, and I’m excited for its next destination to be PlayStation 5. It feels like a platform that will embrace the arthouse nature of the project, while enabling us to show off the most souped-up version of the game possible, on next-gen hardware. Every polygon shall look delectable.
We’re working hard to deliver the game to you as soon as we can. When we pull the game out of the oven we’ll make sure it’s not undercooked nor overdone, but just right.
Strange? Yes. Experimental? Definitely. Regardless of how you’d categorize it, Nour is a weird, playful, and joyous art experience that I think will be right at home here on PlayStation.
