A quiet story of dinner alone
Hot Pot For One is a first-person narrative game about college life. It tells a story of love, friendship, memory, and loneliness, tied together with cooking mechanics.
The game combines the culinary theme of Cooking Simulator with the storytelling aesthetics of games like Passage. The result is a quiet but innovative piece of interactive narrative.
Choose the food, follow the story
This story-driven game opens with the player character, a college student, ordering food in preparation for a lonely night with no friends available. The player is given a few interactive options, including which food to order and which order it should be prepared in when it arrives. Meanwhile, the story unfolds in text messages and other documents.
Food items unlock memories
While there is a large amount of food preparation involved in Hot Pot For One, this is not a cooking-based game in the vein of Cooking Mama since there is no challenge. Instead, the different food items unlock different memories for the protagonist, depicted by onscreen stick-figure drawings. Through these, the story will develop.
A mood-driven game
Hot Pot For One is fundamentally a mood-driven game. It combines many quirkily humorous touches, primarily through the stick-figure drawings, with a melancholy story of loneliness at Christmas. Players who favor action will be disappointed, but those who appreciate storytelling and mood might find something to enjoy.
A pleasant story while it lasts
While there is room to play through the game again, choosing different food items and unlocking various memories in the process, Hot Pot For One lacks replay value, making it similar to many other short, story-driven games. Still, this should not come as too much of a disappointment to players who already know what to expect when they buy the game.
