Visual Novel / Cooking Companions

WARNING: Due to the nature of the game's plot, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

From left to right: Karin, Mariah, Anatoly, and Gregor.

Cooking Companions is a Psychological Horror Dating Sim developed and published by Deer Dream Studios after a successful Kickstarter campaign. An "Appetizer Edition" released on October 6, 2020, and the full version officially released a year later on October 7, 2021. The visual novel can be accessed via Steam or Itch.io.

Deep in the woods of the Tatras Mountains, supplies dwindle and flood waters are rising. It’s up to you to keep spirits high and make the most of your survival skills. Will you butter up the right person? Or will you wind up on the chopping block?

On April 6, 2022, the developers at Deer Dream Studios celebrated the visual novel's half-anniversary with a Twitter thread of appreciation, which also included a sneak peek of the next Cooking Companions-related project. An official trailer on June 1 revealed that it was a free "Chompettes Origins" expansion, which was released in late July 2022.

A standalone sequel, Dread Weight, was announced in September 2022, with the Kickstarter campaign for it launching in June 2023. It has its own Steam page here.

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Tropes:

• Alas, Poor Villain: If you manage to kill Karin, she has an expression that looks like a kicked puppy. As the other ghosts point out in one ending, she was as much of a victim as they were.
• All Just a Dream: In the Appetizer Edition, the first time you start a New Game Plus, you wake up in one of the cabin's beds with Karin and are asked if you just had a nightmare. Runs after that, however, go into That Was Not a Dream territory with Karin now having a Nightmare Face.
• Anthropomorphic Food: The "Chompettes", the game's mascots, are a quintet of basic foods with cutesy faces.
• Arc Words:
  • "You wake in a cold sweat."
  • While only encountered once in-game (in a brief post-credits scene), The Reveal that the player character has asked the same question, "Did you come of your own free will, or were you sent?" a thousand times before has major implications for the plot, character dynamics, and possibly even the character's identity. Not only does it prove that they set up the events intentionally, those are very common arc words from stories about Baba Yaga.
  • “Turn on the light”, “the abyss”, and “something is approaching” also come up frequently.
  • "Reap what you have sown" shows up in at least two endings, both times triggered after the protagonist senses a recently murdered Karin's presence in the basement.
• Bilingual Bonus: At several points throughout the game and the DLC, the spirits of the dead will whisper things in Polish or Portuguese. This being a horror game, these are not happy Easter eggs.
• The Cameo: The extra Nightmare Mode features several cameos from other horror games, including White Face from Imscared, Monster 6 from Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion, and several monsters from Mycorrhiza.
• Cannibal Larder: The player character's Creepy Basement is where they store the corpses of their victims.
• Cannibalism Superpower: As Karin consumes more human meat, she becomes notably stronger, even managing to restrain Gregor and chop off his limbs with little trouble.
• Censored Child Death: The Chompettes are a group of murdered children and their would-be killer, who were all caught by the protagonist before the main story. Their deaths occur offscreen, and by the time the main story starts, they’ve all essentially forgotten their past lives.
• Creepy Basement: The cabin's basement has a notable deadbolt, and the Companions hesitate checking out what's down there. The answer is dead bodies, including your Companions after they "leave".
• A Day in the Limelight: The Appetizer Edition puts a greater focus on the Chompettes, with the stated goal being to find them in a game of hide-and-seek, while the main visual novel focuses primarily on the Companions.
• Deadly Euphemism: "Leaving the cabin" quickly becomes one for the companions giving up their bodies for more meat.
• Disguised Horror Story: Although it's openly advertised as a horror story, it starts off rather cutesy with its Chompette mascots and bonding with your fellow hikers before the inevitable craving for fresh meat arises...
• Double-Meaning Title: At first, you're Cooking with Companions as you make use of the natural wildlife; the player can even unlock recipe cards to recreate the dishes at home. However, there's a sense of dread from the inevitability that you'll be Cooking the Companions to survive.
• Downer Ending: All of the endings are pretty horrible; the only characters that can survive are you and Karin, and both of you are terrible people with the protagonist being revealed to be a serial killer. The ending added in the DLC (where Mariah survives, kills you and escapes the cabin) is the sole exception.
• Dying to Wake Up: The player has multiple nightmares, one on most nights. The common theme is that most depict scary or surreal events happening to the player, with each one ending in a death. Immediately, you wake in a cold sweat.
• Even Evil Has Standards: It's implied that the player doesn't want the "meat" to be cut up alive. They let the residents leave the cabin and either kill them before they can brave the flood waters, or wait for them to fail first before fetching the body. The player character is shaken when Karin cuts up a drugged Gregor and leaves him to pass out from shock and blood loss on the couch, especially when she says she was going to keep him alive for at least a week.
• Evolving Title Screen: The graphics and music of the title screen change after each playthrough depending on which ending you get. Getting the worst end, where Potato convinces the player character to venture out and kill more actively, will get you an appearance from the ghostly Mariah before the screen loads, the title card will be splattered with blood, and the music will be playing backwards.
• Eye Scream: Two of the protagonist's dreams feature this. First is the one featuring two sisters where the protagonist falls into Hell through a chasm in the earth, and we are treated to a description of their eyes boiling from the heat. The other is the dream with the blacksmith who puts the protagonist's eye out with a flaming hot iron.
• The Famine: Dialogue between the protagonist and the four travelers reveals that they are actually refugees fleeing a combination of persecution and disastrous conditions in Ukraine. While never explicitly stated, it seems most likely that the game is set in the 1930s, and they are survivors of the Holodomor.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Gregor has ties on one arm and both legs, similar to the string used on butcher wrappings. It’s no coincidence that those are the limbs that don’t make it.
  • One of the hidden notes you can find is a bloody newspaper clipping about a serial killer called “the Butcher of Zakopane”. It's heavily implied when Potato asks you for his knife back after killing Karin, that he was the Butcher and he was murdered and cannibalized by the player character.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The main four "companions".
  • Karin - Choleric (commanding, ambitious, proud, not afraid to make heavy decisions or be Brutally Honest)
  • Gregor - Sanguine (a friendly, gregarious, optimistic Gentle Giant)
  • Anatoly - Melancholic (serious and analytical, the presumed brains of the group)
  • Mariah - Phlegmatic (kind-hearted, slightly jumpy but mostly perky; The Heart of the group)
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: After Mariah leaves the cabin and becomes the first to be eaten, various things begin to happen such as seeing her head peeking out from the cabinet under the sink on Day 8 and seeing her Nightmare Face float away in the waters at the beginning of Day 9.
• Genre Shift: The game becomes a turn-based RPG battle during the confrontation with Karin in the basement.
• I'm a Humanitarian: After running out of food, it doesn't take long for your companions to develop a taste for human meat. The protagonist is eventually revealed to have already had one for a long time, having allegedly murdered and eaten “generations” of people.
• Jump Scare: Despite the visual novel's Kickstarter campaign stating that the developer's goal is "taking it back to the basics" with "no jump scares, excessive gore, or frustrating dead ends", these are still present, mainly involving Karin. The Appetizer Edition has an entire jumpscare mode that can be unlocked.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's never confirmed whether the Chompettes are figments of the protagonist's mind, or if they're actually the spirits of people the protagonist killed before. The protagonist seems to suspect the former, but the Chompettes themselves claim the latter. Either way, it's confirmed during the battle sequence with Karin that nobody else can see or hear them.
• Multiple Endings: The Appetizer Edition's store page boasts six different endings, and the actual visual novel originally boasted seven, with four more added in the "Chompettes Origins" content update.
• Nightmare Face: While talking about Mariah at the start of Day 9, Gregor, Anatoly and Karin's faces all gain pale, wide-eyed toothy grins at some point in the conversation. While Gregor's and Karin's only last for a single line, Anatoly's face remains nightmarish until he gets another serving of meat. Karin later pulls a much wider variety of them as her Sanity Slippage progresses, and she's at her absolute worst in New Game Plus, with her character sprite being replaced by a ghoulish, zombified version of herself with a permanent Slasher Smile. Even Gregor in New Game Plus—whether you choose to kill him, have Karin kill him, or say nothing and go to bed—will have a grotesque death face, with a shriveled toothy grin and almost photorealistic rolled back eyes.
• No Ending: If the player says they're not at least 18 years old when the game starts, then the story abruptly stops before you can check out the Creepy Basement and experience the more horrifying elements. However, it does unlock an achievement.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: The premise of the story is that the player and four other hikers are trapped in a cabin in the Tantras Mountains (a real location that forms a natural border between Slovakia and Poland) during a storm, and supplies are running low... This turns out to be far from the first time the protagonist has been in this situation.
• Ominous Save Prompt: The game pops up to tell the player that now would be a good time to save the game before going onward. Particularly in Nightmare Mode, when the game tells you to make sure to save before making a decision regarding a ritual and notes that your choice cannot be undone.
• Once More, with Clarity: Completing the game and getting the normal ending will show an expanded version of the opening scene, revealing that the protagonist was not on vacation or escaping with the rest of the cast, as the setup initially suggests. Instead, they lived in the cabin all along, and the other characters stumbled upon it while fleeing the conditions in Ukraine. The player character planned to kill and eat them all along.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Downplayed. The characters are not referred to as such in the traditional sense, but all of the trope's characteristics apply, with them being humans that are reduced to a more primitive and monstrous state after they've indulged in cannibalism. This is especially true for Karin.
• The Pigpen: The player...possibly. The Chompettes repeatedly state how filthy and smelly your character is, but none of the human characters point it out. Then again, since the humans only just met you at the start of the game, they could just be being polite.
• Plucky Comic Relief: The Chompettes are cartoonish vegetables with wacky personalities that add some levity to the situation before everything goes downhill.
• Pokémon Speak: The Chompettes speak clearly in text, but their voice acting consists almost entirely of them saying their names.
• Relationship Values: You can increase your relationship with your companions by talking to them one-on-one when given the choice. Raising your relationship with one companion all the way will unlock extra dialogue options at certain points in the story.
• Sacred Hospitality: The player treats the new friends as their guests, feeding them and housing them from the rain. It's especially sweet since they are refugees. Horribly subverted when you learn the player character has led them into a trap to eat them and has done it many times over the years.
• Shoo Out the Clowns:
  • The Chompettes appear periodically throughout the game, until all of them save Potato seemingly disappear right before the climax of the story. Potato claims they "moved on" [to the afterlife], but unless you're en route for the worst ending, it turns out that he just trapped them in the mouse holes around the house.
  • The critter that sits on Anatoly's shoulder is never seen again after Mariah leaves the cabin, and he never seems to notice. It's implied that the protagonist killed it off-screen, given that not too long later they take out a cutlet of meat to cook, and when Karin asks where they got it from, they don't answer.
• Shout-Out:
  • In Nightmare Mode, checking the garbage can underneath the sink causes the game to remark that it's "empty, like your soul." This is a shout-out to a Running Gag from Youtuber ManlyBadassHero.
  • Later on in the game, the Day counter is set to 204863.
  • A few jumpscares are followed by the phrase "This game is purely fictitious. It cannot harm you in any way, shape, or form." translated in various languages.
  • Earlier in the game, one character asks another what time it is. Their (awkwardly worded, but fitting in context) answer is, "One hour Until Dawn."
• Through the Eyes of Madness: There are implications that the out-of-place Chompettes are a result of this, with the Kickstarter campaign stating "talking to foods can lead you down the road to madness". It goes even further later in the game when the Chompettes reveal that the player character has been sleepwalking every night when they had nightmares, and they seem to have some memory problems or other breaks from reality on top of being a cannibal serial killer.
• Unreliable Narrator: The player character is lying to the player the whole time. They produce meat out of nowhere.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: In addition to the unavoidable parts of the plot, the player character can choose to bully Anatoly alongside Karin, assist her in cutting up Gregor while he's still alive, and refuse Gregor's last request for a blanket as he is dying. Picking the colder options in most cases is actually necessary to raise Karin's relationship values to the max level.
• Was Once a Man: In the Appetizer Edition, the Chompettes are eventually revealed to have once been another group of people that were murdered in the cabin's basement. And in the main visual novel, not only does Karin become a ghoul, one ending has her become a Turnip Chompette.
• Wham Line: Onion says that three people dying in nine days is pretty bad. They go on to say, "But not as bad as five in one night though...right?" After an uncomfortable Beat, Onion says they would lose their lunch if they had to see it again.
  • During the extended opening after the credits roll on a normal run, the protagonist asks the Companions whether they came to the cabin voluntarily, or were sent by someone else. After Anatoly and Karin disagree on their response ("I guess we were sent here?" and "we came on our own free will," respectively), the text box reads:
    They answered incorrectly.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: More like what happened to the squirrel that was shown to be on Anatoly's shoulder at the beginning of the game. Despite this, the squirrel is never mentioned or acknowledged by the cast, especially Anatoly. And when things start to go bad, the squirrel is notably absent from Anatoly's image sprite. While it's never said what happened to the critter, it's not far-fetched to assume that the squirrel was either released by Anatoly, or in line with the theme of this game, was eaten.

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