Game Theory: The Grim Lore of Cooking Companions

hello again it's been so long did you miss me because i definitely missed you i've been watching you you know through the screen watching you do things don't be shy it's okay i'm here for you it's so great we get to spend this time together just you and me how did i do was it perfect now it really can be just us and look dinner's already served hello internet welcome to game theory the show that's part of a balanced youtube diet you've got your math science history lore and cannibalism that's right friends it's the return of cannibalism crossover weekend because nothing says brand safe online content quite like discussing proper nutrition when trapped in a situation where the only food source is human flesh last year around this time we did a three-way collab with the channels where each one talked about cannibalism in some unique way and this year we're bringing it back over on food theory we're learning about what clues you can safely eat before you have to resort to nibbling a knee and over on film theory of well okay it's it's just a two-way crossover between game theory and food theory the timing of the cannibalism episode didn't work out over on film theory and i just i really wanted to talk about the back rooms okay just couldn't resist that sweet sweet lore anyway that food theory about eating clothes was largely inspired by the game we're talking about today cooking companions a visual novel style game produced by deer dream studios a team that saw doki doki literature club and said hold my carving knife i don't know what it is about these games that keeps drawing me in i mean maybe it's the fun characters or the really cute anime art style or the uh oh yep that that one it's definitely the scary hidden lore and boy does cooking companions have lore intrigue for days on the surface it appears to be a story of five characters trapped in a remote cabin with no supplies eventually forced to turn on each other in order to survive now that alone would be pretty darn bleak but bit by bit we start seeing hints to an even darker backstory secret notes in the bathroom locked doors in the basement bones under the floorboards nightmares that suggest the sins of our past and hints that this same scenario is played out thousands of times before so who are we really what horrors have happened inside this cabin and seriously why are we being stalked by a team of talking vegetables i mentioned that one right the talking vegetables no yeah that's a thing too so i hope you're hungry cause i've got some freshly carved lore all ready to serve up first since this game has been criminally underplayed on youtube let me catch you up like most visual novels you play as the unseen protagonist and you start the game in a cabin with your four friends innocent mariah eager anatoly compassionate gregor and karen who's a karen last time i was in here i asked for an almond shape an almond an almond shape and i got something else so if you just do what i asked that would be great it appears that you've gotten lost and you found this cabin to stay in for a few nights as you regroup and we are named chef of the group in true dating sim form you spend your first few days exploring the cabin and interacting with the characters to build relationships learning more about their unique backstories as you go by choosing to visit the right rooms at the right times you also find hidden notes in the bathroom or under floorboards but two days in things start to take a turn your rations run out and a storm rolls in that prevents you from leaving the cabin with starvation very quickly setting in we begin to have nightmares describing horrifying scenes drowning being cooked alive hot pokers in the eye with seemingly no hope of survival mariah offers to swim through the flood waters in an effort to find help or food but we all know the truth you have a tearful goodbye with her as she leaves the cabin never to be seen again in completely unrelated news we managed to find ourselves a new source of mystery meat huh oh lucky guess we're going to be eating good tonight but that mystery meat can only last for so long one by one we lose people from the cabin first anatoly and then gregor leaving us alone with just karen just karen just kidding who really takes a liking to the whole eating human flesh thing fun fact this is actually something that real world scientists have observed in cannibals not something chemically in the meat but it's a high the euphoria that they get from doing something that they know is wrong on a deeply human level that becomes addictive kind of like pringles once you pop the cannibalism don't stop as the days drag on the cabin becomes haunted by the meals of our past all the while karen starts looking a bit too eager and a bit too hungry so we end up locking her in the basement eventually we're like she's gotta be dead right and we go down into the basement but obviously she's not classic girl tries to kill boy boy pulls an uno reverse card steals girl's knife and plunges it into her chest the end or so i thought i actually finished my playthrough on gt live before getting to the final twist because i am a big brain gamer huh all right friends well there you have it i've been watching marvel movies for years there's always a post-credits scene what was i thinking anyway fortunately i did go back and clean up some of the endings and it's at this point that we find out how our characters actually wound up in the cabin see it turns out that you were never part of the group this is your cabin all the others just stumbled across you when they got lost the group explains their situation but then you quote ask the questions you've asked thousands of times did you come on your own free will or were you sent when they say that they come at their own free will but were also technically sent we see that they quote answered incorrectly wait sorry what we've asked this question before is is this some sort of a time loop or are we all in purgatory and keep having to relive this situation in order to you know find a solution where we don't end up eating our friends what is going on here oh and again there are vegetables called the chompets that talk to you when no one else is around probably shouldn't overlook that little detail there's also a nightmare mode and a new game plus and a mode that drops you straight into cuphead i'm sorry i'm sorry what what what world are we living in here okay there's clearly a lot to unpack inside of this thing but it really boils down to two main mysteries the first is what's actually going on inside the cabin what's up with the mysterious notes the nightmares who are we and what does the whole ending sequence about being sent versus free will mean the second main mystery has to do with the chompats those little anthropomorphized food friends that i keep bringing up but also avoiding cause again there's a lot there to discuss you'd think that they're just figments of your cannibalism adult imagination but they are so much more so let's start with the basics shall we who these people are and what they're doing here when the food starts to run out mariah says this quote bread and jam isn't much of a meal but it's more than we had when we left ukraine no obviously that's just a one-off comment but if you max out your relationship with mariah she confesses that the situation in the cabin isn't nearly as bad as what they left in the ukraine given at this point you've basically run out of food with no chance of finding more that is quite the statement she continues quote our village went mad from starvation after the rationing got extreme parents sending their children to orphanages instead of letting them starve at home it was terrible absolutely terrible eventually we decided we needed to escape so we stole supplies until we had enough for the journey to keep our spirits up gregor described it as a vacation you don't usually face death during a vacation though it also gets brought up by karen again in the final battle saying repeatedly that she should have never left ukraine and it's at this point that i'd like to mention the giant elephant in the room while yes i'm making jokes about cannibalism and this game none of it is to make light of the situation that's currently happening over in the ukraine right now or honestly ukraine in the past sadly this is a part of the world that's had to deal with a lot of horrific and tragic events some of which we're actually about to discuss as part of the context for this game it is pure coincidence that cooking companions came out and only months later the country is now suddenly embroiled in war this is not meant to make light of anything happening there i'm making this video to talk about a cool new game with very interesting lore made by a team of passionate creators who made something that i just want more people to know about and thanks to their game i became more aware of the folklore in history coming from that part of the world and as a result i've grown a greater sense of appreciation for the people that are currently being affected by the terrible violent actions that are happening in making this video and sharing it with you i'm hopeful that you're able to take away some of that too our hearts are with everyone who's been affected all the families that have been displaced or torn apart so if anything in this video inspires you to help the people in that region of the world we're linking to relevant charities down in the description that are helping the refugees right now back to the game though it's also worth noting that ukraine isn't the only real world location mentioned like any good indie horror title there are hidden clues scattered throughout which come in the form of handwritten notes that you can only have access to by exploring the right rooms on the right days and by clicking certain interact options multiple times it is not easy to find this stuff but when you do find them two mention zakopane a little polish town about 186 miles or 300 kilometers from the ukrainian border we also get more location hints thanks to the appetizer edition of the game a standalone cooking companions experience released a few months prior to the main title in it you get quizzed by the chompats on general trivia all with hints of that sweet sweet lore one of the questions for instance asks us where we are and the correct answer turns out to be the tetris mountains a forested mountain range that sits between poland and slovakia and wouldn't you know it but just north of the tetris mountains is none other than the little town of zakopane combine that with mariah's comments about needing to escape from ukraine and it seems very clear that mariah gregor anatoly and karen are ukrainian refugees but refugees of what if you follow anatoly's romance line instead of mariah's you end up learning that his dog died when he was six this dog apparently meant a lot to his father as it helped him find food during quote the war obviously there are a lot of wars so which one could he possibly be talking about well it appears to be world war one you see we're told in the extras menu that anatoly is 25. with world war one being between 1914 and 1918 that would mean the game likely takes place between 1933 and 1937 and all of this lines up with the very real very tragic event in the history of ukraine known as holodomor helotomor is a famine that took place in soviet ukraine between 1932 and 1933. its name is a term derived from the ukrainian words for hunger hollowed and extermination more and it was just as brutal as mariah describes to grossly oversimplify the events here dictator joseph stalin aggressively seized control of the farmland and personal property of peasants in order for it to be controlled by the communist soviet government this collectivization movement failed due to government disorganization which destroyed rural economies and led to massive food shortages across the country when peasants started to rebel against these policies in ukraine especially in provinces that had previously fought against the red army during the russian civil war stalin decided it was time to crack down and assert control by creating black lists of towns that wouldn't receive the government-controlled food police were also sent to ransack homes and take anything that was edible crops personal food supplies pets in the end at least 5 million people died of hunger resulting from the great famine at least 3.9 million of which were ukrainian and much like our characters in cooking companions the food situation got so bad that people had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive a doctor wrote in 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal but was quote not sure that i shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you the good people died first those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died those who gave food to others died those who refused to eat corpses died those who refused to kill their fellow man died parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did end quote so it seems like our four cabin friends are refugees running away from the helotomor horrors that are happening over in the soviet states but that then leaves the question of who are we well let's just think about what we do know about our character we're a cannibal that lives in some cabin in the forested mountains of poland and slovakia we also know that we're hideous to look at if our four companions reaction to us when we first arrive is anything to go by during that twist ending we also ask this really random really specific question about free will versus being sent that apparently has itself a right and wrong answer so i started there with that very specific question and immediately got back information on a supernatural being called the baba yaga a character from slavic folklore so we're in the right part of the world who lives in a remote cabin check again often described as an old hag with a deformed appearance again just like our hideous appearance in the game she's also known to cannibalize the visitors to her home ladies and gentlemen we have ourselves a bingo and here's the kicker baba yaga is known for asking that specific free will versus scent question apparently the correct answer for that is i am here 75 of my own free will 65 by compulsion which if you do the math totals up to 140 percent so i don't know maybe she needs some math classes in addition to the chomp bets teaching her cooking classes in fact the more you look at the game the more we find connecting us back to baba yaga sometimes her cabin stands on chicken legs and would you know it but we can find a chicken bone in the bedroom underneath the floorboards as a little easter egg back to that original story not only that but karen is actually designed to look very similar to another character from slavic folklore vasalisa the beautiful a girl that finds baba yaga in the woods during her own story even our nightmares between days of the game point to stories that involve the baba yaga the second dream we get about being shoved into an oven closely follows the russian folktale ivanuska where a boy refuses to be cooked in baba yaga's oven and instead tricks her into showing him how trapping her in the oven and cooking her alive so there you have it we are the baba yaga a cannibal that feasts on those that are lost in the woods and our latest victims are an unlucky group of refugees running away from a famine in their home country except that's still not quite the whole story in nightmare mode of cooking companions we get this line you lost more of your humanity they actually use it multiple times but if we just lost some of our humanity that then implies that we had humanity to start off with right we're not just some evil supernatural force we're a human possessed by a supernatural force and the game seems to back this up after mariah leaves the cabin we have a dream about desecrating a corpse then we wake up in a different room than when we fell asleep having some sort of mystery meat this happens again when anatoly leaves the cabin we dream about putting his glasses aside and cutting him up suddenly we wake up with more meat the game tells you explicitly on a few occasions that you've been sleepwalking which the chompet potato confirms in more detail quote in the first week with the red-haired woman and the others where did you sleep if i can be honest it was truly horrific to witness you would retain the collapse in the middle of the hallway sleepwalking into walls or worse going down into the basement this proves that our non-folklore dreams the ones where we chop people up were not only real but happening while we were asleep we weren't fully in control of our actions and something is keeping us alive beyond what's normal the trumpets do seem to believe that if you're killed karen will take over the cabin implying that the spirit of baba yaga can be passed from person to person in order to protect the cabin and the spirits that reside in it so that just leaves us with one final question how did we end up with the power of baba yaga if we were potentially gonna pass it on to karen if we lost the final battle then wouldn't it make sense for us to have gained it from someone before us well fear not dear theorists because i'm pretty confident that i know how we got here and it has everything to do with the most iconic characters from the franchise characters that you'll notice i still really haven't mentioned all that much today i'm talking of course about the chompats more specifically i think potato is the key putting this whole thing together he feels like the odd one of the group not wanting to participate in the other trumpets games he knows a lot about the caloric needs of the human body and he gives off some strong murder vibes let's just call it a hunch or maybe the fact that he gives us a secret recipe explicitly called slaughter stew could he have been the previous baba yaga the answer to that question is gonna have to wait until part two i know it's frustrating but the chomp bets come with a lot of mysteries that merit a full episode unto themselves so why don't you jump on that subscribe button and stab the notification bell to make sure you don't miss that video when it comes out in a few weeks cause some meals are just better cooked long and slow and hey while you're waiting click on over to our brand new food theory that was uploaded literally right now where we talk more about cooking companions or i guess more accurately how to avoid becoming a cooked companion could you instead eat your clothes the next time you say you'll eat your hats should you do that can you make boot soup what about crocs i hear those things are edible link is on screen right now so if you're hungry for more that episode should hold you over nicely and as always my friends remember it's all just a theory a game theory thanks for watching

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 4,751,872

Keywords: cooking companions, cooking companions game, cooking companions explained, cooking companions all endings, cooking companions gameplay, cooking companions ending, baba yaga, cooking companions baba yaga, cooking companions ending explained, ending explained, ddlc, doki doki, doki doki literature club, scary, horror, scary game, horror game, game theory, game theorists, game theory lore, game theory cooking companions, matpat, matpat cooking companions

Id: nZWl62FVN6U

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/FairyKnightTristan]

This game is a masterpiece.

[u/Only_Dare_2215]

We need a cooking companion 2, one of the best horror games to grace steam