Battle Chef Brigade: Reality (TV) Is Scarier than Fiction
Tof Eklund
The most disturbing horrors simultaneously attract and repulse me. There are games I've picked up and put down because I really didn't want to do the things necessary to progress: Party Hard is a good example, as I find the premise funny but couldn't stomach Michael Myers-ing pixelated ravers and stoners just for being loud and annoying. There are also things I'll never play because they would cause me unbearable anguish: the Genocide Path in Undertale, for example. I daresay it's true that full appreciation of Undertale requires involves working through what it means to actually exterminate all of the monsters in the underground, but I personally can't do it. But no game has ever appealed to me so strongly or repelled me so absolutely as Battle Chef Brigade.
Cute? Or is it all for the camera?
Battle Chef Brigade is not a horror game. It's a hybrid puzzle and side-scrolling fighter about trying to win a contest to be top chef in a fantasy world. That's an amazing premise. The game oozes visual appeal with it's vivid, Ghibli-esque art style, and the character design is also really appealing. Trinket Studios has received kudos for Mina, the game's plucky protagonist. Then there's Thrash, Mina's foil/co-protagonist. Thrash is an Orc with a kind heart and a chunky build, more weightlifter than body-builder, and his passion is for cuisine, not war (of course, given the premise of the game). Put Thrash in a dating sim and you can't take my money fast enough.
I love almost every aspect of this game: the art, the characters, the idea of blending Cooking Mama with match-3 puzzle mechanics… but I've never played the game, despite thinking about getting it every time I see or hear something about Battle Chef Brigade. Every time I get to the bit where you go hunting for rare monsters, I want to cry. They're bright and vibrant but it's not like they're super-cute: it might actually be easier if they looked like Pokemon: filleting and pan-searing the little bastards can't possibly be worse than keeping them in fist-size cages in-between dogfights, right? It's like the Tool song about the carrots: "life feeds on life;" I've killed and eaten everything from lichen (wtf?) to orcs in roguelike games, and never thought twice about it. Despite being a vegetarian (a rather flexible one, I admit), I'm pretty okay with running down cows and chicken and pigs and hacking them up with a sword or an axe in Minecraft, and we all know I have no qualms splattering unarmed scientists in Carrion. So what is it about hunting in Battle Chef Brigade that makes me want to dig a hole and hide in it?
That horn sells for 100 gp per gram.
It's not that it's too graphic; I'd call it family-friendly in that regard. It's not that you're killing helpless, nonviolent animals: the monsters are hostile and attack on sight. It's not that what you're doing is wrong in-game—following fantasy-world conventions, monsters are prevalent and threatening. Hell, if you have to kill monsters, it's only sensible to eat the non-toxic ones, and if you're going to eat them, they might as well taste good, right? So what's wrong with me?
It's not the side-scrolling fighting sequences that're the problem. It's what I carry into them. The entire rest of the game is modeled on "Iron Chef"-style reality TV cooking contests. There are celebrity judges and an audience, and I can't bracket that out of the hunting/fighting part of the game. It's all a show, for the judges and the home audience, and the fictional premise of needing to fight monsters sloughs off, leaving only the idea that they're killing everything from slimes to dragons purely for prestige and the entertainment of the home audience. Clips of Thrash being cute with his wife and baby don't just break my heart (why are all the good ones taken?): it's another part of the reality TV formula, and that's all I see. I see our modern life of commitment to work, obsession with celebrity, and rampant unsustainable consumerism.
Bow before celebrity.
Sigurd slew the dragon Fafnir, roasted and ate the beast's heart, and so learned the language of birds. Here I am, reduced to cutting the still-beating heart out of an ancient wyrm so I can present it to fantasy Simon Cowell in a red wine reduction. Will the celebrity gods find me worthy? When I steal the only egg of the (formerly) immortal Phoenix, will my firebird custard souffle buy me five minutes of fame? Or will I be condemned to the showrunners' interview of shame, where they'll badger me until I cry on camera?
I'm not being fair to Battle Chef Brigade: it's troping and finding humour in taking modern society into a fantasy setting. It's not an issue of realworld morals or ethics: Trinket Studios is an indie team of three people, not a huge AAA industry titan built on overwork and abuse of employees. It's not like there is anything value-neutral about other games. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has the player infiltrating societies of language and tool-using peoples only to turn around and slaughter them in the name of reconquista, and then chopping up their corpses and cooking bits of them into your elixirs.
Battle Chef Brigade is a clever concept, a passion project, a move towards a broader set of themes and concepts for video games. I'd love to play it, but I can't bear to think about it. Maybe you should try it. Tell me all about it if you do. No, wait, don't. I'm afraid.
