I stumbled across this one while browsing the IFComp entries. Nice wholesome little game where you're hired on a trial basis to prepare weekly community meals for a village.
All the food for whatever reason is vegetarian, except for a couple of recipes you can eventually unlock with fish. The cookbooks you can buy do a good job selling it though with their descriptions, and there's a pretty large collection of recipes to track and ingredients to buy without complicating it more than that I suppose.
Thanks to this game I actually learned a bit about Indian food. (Which until now has been one area of cuisine I proudly knew bupkis about, you can't even get it here except in a freezer section.)
Your goal is to become enough of a part of the community, and host successful enough weekly gatherings that you've gained a certain amount of villager approval by the end of the month. Sounds simple enough, but there's enough going on with money and time management to add some light challenge.
I think it might be honestly one of the better cases for Twine I've ever seen, the IF landscape beyond our walls would look very different if its users more often had the desire to create things that felt like
games and not 300 words of reflection on being gay and depressed.
...that said it's still a
little gay, one thing that's hard not to notices is the bizarrely high number of alphabet folks in this small community of a few dozen buildings. It quickly started feeling like every couple getting a throwaway mention in the flavor text events was either gay or contained a they/them.
So anyway, you are the chef of this vegetarian LGBT commune, but still having a nice time. In addition to the making money and shopping, there's random villagers to assist, and you can seek out a community board to check if anyone needs any favors done. And aside from your assistant house hob, there's three major NPCs you can befriend across a series of interactions. (I opted to pursue a forbidden heterosexual relationship with the nerdy guy running the museum.)
Anyway, the writing is cozy and the overall theme is community and togetherness, paired with some simple but solid mechanics. So Eikas is a pretty decent way to spend a couple hours--and then a bit more time once you google the name and go down a rabbithole on Epicureanism.
(Yes I know this thread will wither away and die outside the Lounge, but damn it the Parlor Room is the PROPER PLACE for IF discussion!)
