Cook a hand-drawn Lunar New Year dinner in this cute free indie game
Good times and great illustrations in Tet
While Lunar New Year celebrations continue (I'm enjoying all the fireworks over my neighbourhood at night), you might fancy joining in by playing Tet. This lovely little free indie game has you zooming through minigames to prepare a dinner for a Vietnamese Lunar New Year party before all your guests arrive. Chop this, fry those, and don't forget to wash your hands! Designed and hand-drawn by Swiss-Vietnamese illustrator Charlotte Broccard, it's a lovely five minutes of fun.
Tet is a chain of culinary minigames, a series of tasks hitting the broad steps of a dish. Click and drag to cut tofu. Chase banana slices around the fying pan with your cursor, and tug to pull apart a head of lettuce. Click, hold, and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down to grate carrot. They're not difficult but it is on a timer and you can lose if guests arrive before you're ready, you terrible host.
It's a lovely-looking little game, bold and playful and fun. I like the little visual gags too, the eerie long fingers squishing bugs and the strange variations of a cheery thumbs-up for a good job. And while you are on the timer, do also take a split-second to fiddle about with other stuff in the scene to see what happens.
Ah, Tet is just very nice. Some consider that word to be damning with faint praise but no, it's nice when things are nice.
"This project started with the desire to share my passion for cooking, to teach the tasty recipes of my lovely Vietnamese mom, and to make you smile with my drawings and ideas," Broccard says. And it really does teach recipes. At the end, you can see the full cooking instructions for the two dishes you zoom through. I'm quite curious about trying the tapicoa pearl & banana dessert myself.
Tet is out now free on Steam (with the opportunity to tip at the end) and pay-what-you-want on Itch.io (with no minimum price) for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's also available for iOS and Android doodads. It's published by Playables, who also published Kids.
