Samantha Chong wrote a piece on the indie video games bringing South and Southeast Asian food to your screen for Gastro Obscura, looking at the ways these games bring communities together through a love of cooking.
Samantha explored India, Singapore, and the Philippines for a variety of games involving vampires, lost recipes and lots of home cooking.
Here’s the game where you work with ghosts and Chinese vampires known as jiangshi:
After School Afterlife
Singapore
Heather and Megan Lim, two sisters from Singapore, don’t work in video games. Megan is a law student, and Heather works in a bank. But both sisters have a passion for games, and, during quarantine, they decided to make a game based on the culture of the Peranakan Chinese, the descendants of the first wave of Southern Chinese traders who intermarried with local Malays in the region.The result is the upcoming platformer After School Afterlife. In the game, players must escape a Peranakan Chinese mansion that sits between the worlds of the living and the dead. But along the way, the game features both Peranakan and Singaporean Chinese traditions, especially those that relate to food.
There are links to all the games on the Gastro Obscura page and I highly recommend you check them out.
