“ABSURD, yet delicious,” is game designer, digital artist and brains behind Nour: Play With Your Food Tj Hughes’ succinct summation of the game that dropped on September 12. The official website describes Nour as “an interactive exploration into the aesthetics of food” and a collection of “20+ goal-free, edible vignettes”.
The year 2023 will long be remembered as one of the best ones for videogaming. Across platforms and genres, there have been some absolute crackers hitting digital and physical storefronts. Nour is one of the more peculiar and intriguing ones on this list because it actively seeks to disrupt the key underpinnings of video gaming — success and failure.
“I really wanted to challenge the concept of adding gamifying elements to Nour, because the thing that made the project fun to look at was the food being thrown around and creating chaos,” explains Tj, “I didn’t want to add any artificial barriers to that, just for the sake of making it ‘a game’.”
Maximum Fun, Minimum Conditions
In terms of guiding principles, he goes on to add, “It was incredibly important to me personally to never cave on this design choice because while demoing games, I would often see people turn down trying out a demo because they were ‘bad at games’, or afraid of doing something wrong.” This, he adds, made him think about how many people just don’t play games because of the crushing negative feedback of a ‘game over’. “I love traditional games, but I think we can include an entirely new audience if we take away the stress of playing the game ‘right’,” Tj says.
Over the years, an increasing number of developers have been championing the cause of there being no ‘right’ way to play, and the results are there for all to see. Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda (both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom), Animal Crossing (any title really, but New Horizons in particular) and so on. As a game that doesn’t require you to do x, y and z, but instead wants you to have fun making the biggest mess you can.
As far as my most memorable creations go, it was a toss-up between the tornado of flaming pieces of toast and the leaning tower of burgers. For Tj, it’s the ice cream bathtub, because as he explains, “That level is what the inside of my mind looks like.” But in the real world, it’s a different story. “Chicken Tikka Masala with garlic naan and mango lassi. Y’all know what’s up, act like that’s not the tastiest dish you ever had,” he offers, ruing, “It was too visually complex to render in the game, though.”
In a pre-release video, there was a section that had Tj describing Nour and what it’s like. His reference to the game as “from childhood faux pas to high art” was most striking and so naturally, I had to dig deeper. “One of my favourite things about Nour is that while playing, people tend to start talking to me about their own personal food anecdotes; things that they used to do with food as a kid,” says the St Louis, Missouri-based artist, “A lot of these stories involve adults looking at them funny or criticising them about how they’re treating their food. This is typically followed by them immediately mashing every button on the controller in Nour. It feels like a new way to connect with folks!”
The Making Of Nour
“I was just messing around,” replies Tj when I ask for Nour’s origin story, and then elaborates, “Back in like 2016, I was teaching myself how to make shaders, as I’ve been making games for a bit, and have always been obsessed with lighting and colour. I started with bubble tea and folks seemed to be into it. Next up I wanted to make virtual ramen because I thought it’d be neat/funny.” The response he received was much more positive than he could’ve imagined, especially when members of the public told him that the screenshots made them hungry.
“I took this and ran with it. Eventually, folks wanted me to show the project at interactive art events, but it wasn’t even interactive! I started hooking up controls to foods, and that’s how it became an entire video game over time,” he continues.
As the project began snowballing, Tj recalls that his priority was to create pretty graphics. He says, “I noticed how much love that anime studios put into making food look delicious, and was hoping that 3D video games could give it the same kind of love, since food is usually just a background prop in video games.” Inspiration for him came from all corners. “In the early days, I took inspiration from Tumblr food photography blogs, as well as anime gif blogs. I also pull from pop art photography, which frames subjects in a certain way and uses many saturated colours,” he says.
At this point, I feel compelled to find out about the game’s name, and the story behind it. “Since the game is quite minimal and has a pop art aesthetic, I wanted the name to reflect that. So I took the word ‘nourishment’, and chopped off most of the word, and gave it a clean sans serif font. It’s pretty, and low calorie, just like the game itself,” comes the reply. Just as I’m digesting this, Tj adds, “I hear Nour is also a word meaning ‘light’ in Arabic. There are many people named Nour as well. Shoutout all the Nours.” He goes on to send a 🫶🏿their way for good measure.
No journey worth its salt is without its obstacles and Nour’s has been no different. “Finalising designs and calling the game done was incredibly difficult, because there wasn’t really a formula to follow,” states Tj, “We were making something weird, and knew that, and were really committed to that. There was a lot of tweaking, but at some point you just have to call it good enough; you could tweak things in game design for years, and still find flaws.”
The Last Bite
If I was to summarise my hours spent building impossible culinary creations and laying them to waste shortly after in Nour: Play With Your Food, I would struggle to find a better phrase than “absurd, but delicious”. Beyond the concept, it’s also the approach that I’ve found so unique. This isn’t a game on which I spent more than 30 minutes at a stretch, but it’s one that I’ve come back to repeatedly over the course of a day. Like visits to the refrigerator, I kept returning for just one more bite, and then another. That’s been my key takeaway (I promise I will stop with the puns now) from the game, but what is the message its creator wants to send?
“I hope people walk away from Nour realising that the food isn’t real and they should probably go eat,” says Tj, tongue firmly buried in cheek, “But before you do, I hope people take screenshots and post them, while talking about a food experience the game reminded them of. That’d be the best!” You know what to do.