If you've a taste for the experimental, oddball games from PlayStation Network's early days, Nour: Play with Your Food might satisfy that craving. This unusual title is a digital celebration of food, though certainly not table manners; it provides several gastronomical vignettes and lets you mess around to your heart's — and your stomach's — content.
It forgoes any objectives or plot, resembling a digital plaything more than a traditional game. Nour gives you 20 levels, each focusing on different meals or cooking processes. These become the backdrop for you to get creative with food, either attempting to arrange delicious-looking meals or create pure culinary chaos. Pleasingly realistic 3D models are all affected by physics, and a selection of tools and spells let you manipulate things even further; turning food various colours, changing shapes and sizes, making everything dance, setting stuff on fire, and plenty more.
There's no doubt this novel little game will keep you going for a while. Even without a tangible end goal, there's absolutely some fun to be had just mucking around with food — stacking burgers into the stratosphere, flinging tapioca balls into a cup of milky tea, or throwing stuff into a microwave and watching the results. As mentioned, you can go a little crazy, spawning hundreds of objects and having them form constellations, or you can aim for intricacy, creating delicious-looking American breakfasts or bowls of ramen. Whatever you fancy, a basic photo mode lets you snap Instagram-worthy shots.
However, Nour is more a quick snack than a filling main course. For us, it's like a packet of crisps; lots of flavour and satisfying while it lasts, but it's all over very quickly. You can nosh through this game in an hour or two, after which you're given more ways to mess with each level, but there's little reason to return for seconds. It's a neat novelty, it makes solid use of the DualSense's features, and it looks and sounds great. Ultimately, though, it didn't hold our attention for long. Of course, everyone's taste buds are different, so you may enjoy toying with this endlessly, but for us, it's no more than a yummy appetiser.
Comments 6
This looks like screen saver at a retail store to sell you a tv. I'd pay free for this.
I sort of suspected this was mid when we got a shadow release date announce, even though this was one of the first games showed in those PS5 conferences back in 2020.
@LazyLombax Yes to both
I’ve got that taste for oddball, experimental games. I’m tempted to get it. Might read a few more reviews first, but the price isn’t bad with the PS+ sale.
Bought this to try with my son. Let's see how it goes.
Update: My son loved this, even my wife started playing. Was a great gaming evening, rare to see everyone playing together.
@LazyLombax Have to agree with you there. Was expecting something a little more filling and, like you, was bored by the end as I kinda expected some sort of point behind each level and not just randomly hitting buttons to see what everything does, messing around for a few minutes then moving onto the next level because you’ve had enough and want something new only for that to grow stale quickly ad nauseam until the credits roll. Yes, there a Platinum but I’m only about halfway there at the moment and with MK1 launching tomorrow I doubt I’ll be rushing back for seconds …
… only a 3/10 at most from me and that’s being generous!
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