Video Game / Pixel Junk Nom Nom Galaxy

Welcome to Soup Co., Astroworker!

Nom Nom Galaxy is a sidescrolling Tower Defense Factory-Building Game game about the Serious Business of Soup production. In it, you play as a nameless Astroworker tasked with going to distant planets, finding things to make delicious Soup out of, and protecting your Office from rival soup companies. Your mission - conquer the universe and unify it under one tasty, all encompassing brand of Soup.

Nom Nom Galaxy breaks from the traditional format of Pixel Junk, trading rapid-fire arcade gameplay for a more sedate open-world strategy game. Corporate Conquest^note functionally equivalent to a story mode puts the Astroworker up to a series of increasingly hostile planets with the goal of producing factories capable of dominating the market and running out local competitors. Later on, S.O.O.P. Sim cracks the sandbox elements of Nom Nom Galaxy wide open, removing strict objectives in favor of building the biggest, most efficient factory possible. And if it's all too tough, up to three other Astroworkers can join in and conquer planets together.

This game contains examples of the following tropes:

• Action Bomb: Jack can be smacked to blow holes in otherwise indestructible rocks. Some invaders will also blow themselves up to damage your factory.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Almost every Challenge has some kind of alliterative name^note Such as "Fully Functioning Factory Fun" or "Flashy Fish-Fu Fighting", alongside a variety of different Soup names.
• Aliens Love Human Food: The universe utterly adores Soup, to the point where its very existence has become Serious Business and production of it is a cutthroat competition.
• Baseless Mission: Appears sporadically throughout Corporate Conquest. Some missions will give you all or part of a factory to start with, but others will expect the player to build all or part of a factory from scratch.
• Boring, but Practical: Most Soups that are composed of simple, easily renewable ingredients^note Such as Bluecaps, Greenstalk, Stabgrass and Sunblossoms will becomes staples of the player's Soup arsenal considering how easy it is to crank them out in droves. And since market share is determined by how much soup you ship, it's often much easier and more efficient to load up on soups made purely of these.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Mossy Mammoths are huge enemies found deep underground on a handful of planets, who can take a massive amount of punishment on par with most Queens and can tear unprepared Astroworkers apart. Killing one makes it drop Mammoth Meat, which is one of the most valuable (and rarest) ingredients in the game. Mossy Mammoths also never respawn; when you kill one, it's gone for good.
• Capitalism Is Bad: An overarching theme throughout Nom Nom Galaxy; you spend your time ravaging landscapes to create automated Soup factories, exploiting upper and lower class citizens alike for the sole purpose of making a buck. Many scenarios also involve you exploiting wars and disasters to sell more Soup. Robo-Shacho also revels in the relentless harm Soup production is doing to both local governments and the galaxy at large - except when the shenanigans of Soup production come back to haunt moguls such as him.
• Cool, but Inefficient: You can make Soup out of a variety of rare and practically nonrenewable ingredients^note Like Oxygen Flowers, Bisausages and Mammoth Meat, but sooner or later those resources will run out, and the Soup Machines will need to be converted to something renewable. To make it worse, many of these soups are only marginally more valuable than their more mundane counterparts - or are less valuable!
• Chainsaw Good: The default Buzzsaw can be used to drill through the earth, and also deal low damage to enemies.
• Chubby Chef: The Astroworkers all look quite portly, and they're the ones producing all the Soup and shipping it off.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: There are some really unappetizing Soup recipes that go for very little, but the one that takes the cake is Red Ink Rasam, a Soup produced with what is, in effect, strawberries and squid-fly meat.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dying only sends an Astroworker back to their Office^note or the spawn point if an Office doesn't exist yet or hasn't yet been reached dropping whatever ingredient they might have been holding along with some Matter and Gold... which can be picked right back up anyways.
• Does Not Like Spam: The newsfeed will occasionally show a negative broadcast about a certain ingredient - shipping any soup that contains this ingredient until the next broadcast will provoke a "BAD!" response from the market, resulting in gaining minimal Market Share (or even losing some).
• Early Game Hell: Comes in two flavors in general and in Corporate Conquest.
  • In general, putting together your factory for the first few days requires careful resource management, and you can't wait to start shipping Soup so you can have enough Gold to purchase robots and turrets. You also need to be very conscious of where you plant your Office, as starting in a bad place without convenient access to resources can jeopardize you for the rest of the game. Once you can set up some automation for the Soup making process, the game becomes much easier.
  • Corporate Conquest starts you with minimal technology and building materials that make automating anything nearly impossible, resulting in a lot of repetitive manual labor to harvest plants, run Soup Machines and ship Soup. Once you start to unlock Robots and better factory parts, building up a factory becomes easier and more efficient.
• Eating Optional: Astroworkers can eat any raw ingredients they find, but this is only to replenish health which is restored at the end of every work day or after dying.
• Endless Game: S.O.O.P. Sim allows you to build without needing to worry about being pushed out of the market, shipping as much Soup as you can and fending off increasingly large waves of invaders.
• Everything Breaks: Your Buzzsaw can carve up the landscape with ease, plants and animals can be torn apart with just about everything, creature nests can be destroyed with enough firepower, and parts of your factory can be decimated by yourself and enemies. The only thing that isn't immediately breakable is dark dirt, but with the application of Jack, even that's not an issue.
• Evil Versus Evil: All of the Soup corporations (including Soup Co.) are relentless, vicious industry giants who will stop at nothing to exploit every last planet they can get their hands on for the sole purpose of producing Soup.
• Forced Tutorial: To begin Corporate Conquest, you need to complete a training mission. Note that nothing you do in this tutorial counts towards Astro Pins or achievements, compounding the frustration on top of a Tutorial Failure described below.
• Genre-Busting: It's a sandbox simulation game tower defense thingy.
• Gimmick Level: Several planets will restrict the capabilities of Astroworkers due to In-Universe restrictions and conditions. Changes include not being able to build Soup Rockets, purchase Robots, and in one case taking away the Buzzsaw until enough Soup is shipped.
• Impossibly Delicious Food: The "Nutrient Nova" soup is described as legendary by the game's achievements and is worth a whopping 500 coins. Mix a Thornboom and a Poisonpuff to produce it.
• Justified Tutorial: When you begin Corporate Conquest, the Astroworker is a new employee at Soup Co and must complete basic training before being able to work proper.
• King Mook: Kicking around nests on later planets might cause them to release a Queen, a massive, exceedingly durable version of a regular enemy that deals much more damage and moves a lot faster than usual. Killing it will result in a fountain of the species' usual Organ Drops alongside a lot of Gold and Floppies.
• Medicinal Cuisine: The mission on Pedicem has you producing soup to help combat an ongoing pandemic; the market will frequently favor soups created with Poisonpuff mushrooms, which are described as having medicinal properties when prepared.
• MegaCorp: You work for one, and you compete against others.
• Mook Maker: Creature nests constantly produce creatures, and killing creatures near nests (or sometimes even going near a nest) will cause them to start summoning more.
• Organ Drops: Killing wildlife will produce a unique Ingredient that can be used to make Soup, such as steaks, filets, and meat chunks.
• Planimal: Most of the monsters you fight are these things.
• Palette-Swapped Alien Food: Some ingredients are this; Mammoth Meat is just green-skinned ham, Brineweed is just reddish-orange seaweed, Masher Yams are just white potatoes, and Bluecaps and Greenstalk are just bright blue and deep green mushrooms respectively.
• Protection Mission: Whenever an invasion begins, the office needs to be protected from inbound Mooks. If the Office is destroyed, it's an instant Game Over.
• Resources Management Gameplay: A key part of the game is knowing when to gather resources and when to exploit them to ship as much Soup as possible. Building up sustainable ways of producing resources will help drastically in the long run. You also need to know how to carefully manage resources that are significantly harder (if not impossible) to renew in order to make as much from them as possible.
• Remilitarized Zone: Fisuno, a late-game planet, is covered in the remains of a city ravaged by the Bio-Battery War. Attacks on this planet from invaders are frequent and dangerous from the very first day. Bombs are buried throughout the planet as well, which can be detonated by smacking or shooting them.
  • Nearby planets have been consumed by the Bio-Battery War as well and have similar gimmicks, such as Kabuuf, Ryoho, and Gotsudak.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Any factory piece you place will be constructed in a few seconds, and any robot or tower you place will immediately start working.
• Serious Business: Soup-making, to the point where the entire universe strictly revolves around making exotic and delicious Soup, and wars will break out over who produces it. Companies also live and die by their ability to produce Soup that pleases the masses.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The Shotgun you eventually get will shred most low-level enemies in a single shot at point blank range, but will require several pulls to put down even a weak enemy at anything longer than about ten blocks away.
• Shout-Out: A variety of Soup flavors are references to other media, such as...
  • Blue Bison - Named after the "Blue Buffalo" brand of dog food.
  • Blue Screen - Refers to the infamous Blue Screen of Death.
  • Bouillon du Bends - Named after The Electric Bends, who made the music for Nom Nom Galaxy.
  • Chicken of The Cave - Named after "Chicken of the Sea", a real-life brand of canned seafood.
  • Double Rainbow Dew - A reference to the infamous "double rainbow" meme.
  • Harvest Brew and Harvest Moon - Direct references to Harvest Moon.
  • Major Tom - Named after the character "Major Tom" from Space Oddity.
  • StarTropic - Named directly after StarTropics.
  • Strawburi Field - A reference to Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles.
  • Truffle Shuffle - Named after the "truffle shuffle" dance from The Goonies.
  • Vineshroom - Vinesauce's logo is also often called the Vineshroom.
• Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: Your boss is presumably a type 3, while the robots you build to automate the production of soup are closer to a 1 or 2.
• Starting Units: Some earlier factories will give you a few Robots to start with which you might not have access to yet.
• Stuck Items: You can't take an ingredient out of a Soup Machine once you stick it in, and Soup Machines must be destroyed and recreated to change the type of Soup they make.
• Tutorial Failure: The game's tutorial plants you in a premade factory with little in the way of explanation as to how any of it actually works, alongside using a variety of Robot units and factory parts you don't have any access to at that time. This in turn does little to prepare you for the first mission which tasks you with building a functional factory with minimal parts and automation capability. And to top it all off, nothing you do in this tutorial counts towards anything; you will gain no progress on your Astro Pins nor any Achievements.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Robo-Shacho cannot comprehend the secret ingredient in the Legendary Recipe at the end of the game - love.
• Working-Class Hero: The Astroworkers are the lowly middle-managers of Soup Co and the player characters, tasked with building factories in a variety of environments ranging from dangerous to outright inhospitable.
• Worker Unit: Almost of the Robots you can hire are these, with their purpose being to automate the process of making and transporting Soup in various ways. The only exceptions are Jack, Arthur, and Jimmy.
• World of Pun: A vast majority of names for sectors, Soups, and businesses are soup-based puns when they're not some sort of Shout-Out. The newspaper that appears at the start and end of every mission is named the Daily Soupernova, on top of that.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Matter must be gathered from mining the landscape and killing Mooks.
• Zerg Rush: The basic strategy of any inbound Mooks sent by rival Soup companies; just send lots at once and attack mindlessly.