Dosa Divas Review – Cooking With Fire

Dosa Divas is an active, turn-based adventure where you cook with love and fight against an evil empire. As you should.

Stored away in the attic of my house, there is a box full of old photo albums and documents. In it, there is a memory I treasure the most. A typewritten recipe for a heartwarming noodle soup. My grandma would always cook it for me and my brother when she would take care of us. A deeply formative experience, her lasting love was channeled through one of the best dishes I have ever tried. The taste is one that makes me reminisce about simpler, more comforting times. Dosa Divas knows this all too well: the act of cooking is an act of love.

Much like Venba before it, Dosa Divas’ focus on cooking is but one of the game’s pillars, with its core conflict a rather timely one. Samara and Amani, often referred to as aunties, are two sisters who had a falling out that is heartwrenchingly explained in time. Now reconciled, they are fighting against a corporation ruled by, surprisingly, their younger sibling Lina. Everywhere you turn in this world, there are flyers advertising Lina Meals. Luckily, you can tear them down to reduce her tyrannical grip on society.

It is abundantly clear that coexisting with a company hellbent on raising its profits will eventually cause irreparable damage to its ecosystem. With Dosa Divas’ main quest being arriving to a city called Meyndish (heh), Amani and Samara find just how devastating Lina’s rise to success is. Overworked, starving, and struggling to make ends meet, the stories found within are unflinchingly honest and human. When the safety net is paper-thin, it is inevitable for someone to exploit its weaknesses.

Because the sisters ran a beloved restaurant, a QTE-riddled minigame based around cooking allows them to feed the needy. A point of contention for some, these can be completed automatically in the accessibility settings. Drawing many parallels with our current capitalist lives, people often fall to the wayside in this world. Where nobody bats an eye, our heroines do care and feed everyone on their journey. The phrases of gratefulness they utter once you show empathy make it all worth it.

Clocking in at a nimble 12-15 hours, the fun in most of Dosa Divas’ moment-to-moment action is derived from its turn-based combat. Sprinkled with active elements a la Sea of Stars, they can defend themselves with a well-timed button press to negate damage. Likewise, certain skills will have a prompt to extend the attack to cause massive damage to enemies as well. To be constantly fighting against corporate pencil-pushers and sycophants gives a sense of satisfaction that just battling fantastical monsters wouldn’t give.

Dosa Divas’ focus on exploration makes it rewarding to look around every town on the way. Ingredients such as mangoes or bananas are scattered to cook specific dosas required by NPCs. Enemies also drop a variety of ingredients. Lastly, fishing—a fan-favorite pastime—makes for more protein-based tasty treats. A flirty traveling merchant offers any remaining needs, from various seasonings to more hard-to-find ingredients.

RPGs are well known for their inspired, often bizarre, worlds. While Dosa Divas walks a fine line between fantasy and reality, its sentient mechs are probably among the more unbelievable aspects of it. The way the sisters move through the world is on top of a mechanical being. The reasoning behind it pushes disbelief but ultimately has a powerful message. Furthermore, it makes each boss fight with other mechs exciting, in no small part due to the thumping music and flashy moves.

The beating heart of Dosa Divas is undoubtedly its family-based narrative. Not only focusing on Samari, Amani, and Lina, some characters lament the losses of their loved ones. Remembering crucial childhood memories thanks to special dishes, these intimate moments abound in an otherwise bombastic and fast-moving tale. Jealousy, envy, and abuse are some internal conflicts portrayed. Never bordering on preachy messaging, the disarming honesty in which these personal stories are told holds up all the way to the impactful finale.

Outerloop Games’ latest entry weaves a heartfelt narrative that reminds us of the cultural act of cooking. One of the more common ways to show love to our close ones, its family narrative has its heart in the right place. Its tight turn-based system moves along at a natural pace, with its active inputs keeping things dynamic. In the end, Dosa Divas is a timely adventure that challenges the dangers of capitalism head-on, killing it with kindness.