For the second week in a row, we have a fun, smaller scale turn-based RPG inspired by the JRPG classics. Dosa Divas continues independent studio Outerloop Games' South Asian inspirations that appear in every title, with another turn-based RPG after the enjoyable Thirsty Suitors. Both games focus on confronting the past and facing family and friends.

You play as Samara who is accompanied by her sister, Amani who she hasn't seen for ten years, and their spirit mech, Goddess. They are on a journey to visit their parents and younger sister, Lina, so Amani can share important news over a family meal.

But as the trio venture towards their parents' home, they find an all-consuming fast food empire, Lina Corp, run by their sister, has made all handmade food redundant and forced every village to work for her company or pay a dire price. However, Amani and Samara can't stand by and watch the places and people they used to know be a shell of themselves. They choose to intervene and help each community reconnect with their traditions by trying to stop Lina Corp and revitalise everyone with their culinary prowess.

This strong setup powers the narrative from beginning to end. You first meet the estranged sisters and notice their conversations are often fractious - a shared trauma and history leaves too much unspoken. But one thing that connects them as sisters and chefs is food; powerful recipes that can summon special memories and moments in time. Even if they're bond is imperfect, they hold a special power to bring people together.

As you guide Amani and Samara on their over ten hour adventure, you take pride in their growing bond as food slowly brings them together. It's another empathetic story that delves into the themes of family, trauma, environmentalism, capitalism, disability, cultures, community and more. There's a kindness present that emotionally driven stories across all media have tried to hone in on over the last few years. A heartwarming story about confronting anger and shame, and learning to forgive. How the smallest regrets can break you down and cost you time and your sense of self, if you don't face them.

Outerloop Games' writers portray this through snappy, humorous and honest dialogue that helps create fully drawn main characters with emotional depth. Amani can't stop her short fuse, but instantly feels remorseful. Samara is honest, but isn't always sure on the best method to say something without hurting someone's feelings.

This works best when the game allows you to select Samara's dialogue, as she is our perspective throughout the game. Short sections where you choose what she says to help craft the scene. It makes you feel involved in establishing the bond between the sisters and closer to Samara's internal struggles - a simple form of player choice that makes the game feel more interactive.

You control Goddess who transports the two sisters in an isometric perspective around the world map. Dosa Divas' structure sees you visit every town between your ehd destination to visit your parents. The sisters feel compelled to remind the townsfolk the real power of home cooking and how they used to be a self-sustainable community.

This is apparent in the first location, Buroth Village, a worn out community where they're always hungry, reliant on Lina Corp to deliver their next shipment of ready meals. They've even forgotten the joys of cooking and sold up all of their cooking utensils - a mirror to the capitalist framework of selling to a larger corporation to dream of something bigger, when it's often worse than you already had. A metaphor that extends to today's games industry where swathes of game studios are created or bought, to be disbanded before they've had a chance to thrive.

Inside the villages, Goddess can sit the sisters down in front of lampposts to save the game before exploring. Goddess also has many platforming abilities: the mech can sprint with its arms back like a ninja, double jump to higher platforms, wall run across gaps, zip line, and as the story progresses, you acquire helpful modifications.

Exploring the villages, the sisters collect fruits and vegetables, meats, collect crabs and complete a fishing mini game, pet a dog and more. Or for rarer ingredients like bread, you can spend scrap found around the world at the shop. Necessary supplies to enter one of Dosa Divas biggest gameplay mechanics: cooking. You enter a new screen where you select the required ingredients to make meals like the game's namesake, the dosa: a crispy crepe like dish that originated in South India.

In order to construct a tasty dish, you pick a recipe and complete various mini games, like tapping a button in time with horizontal moving blocks or spinning the stick the right amount to stay within a zone. Fortunately, the developers keep these fresh by introducing further challenges as the game advances. And if you perfect each mini game and achieve a super rank, you can multiply the amount of meals that you make with one set of ingredients. Meals can be used as health items during battle, but are mainly used to feed NPCs in the villages. You activate these quests by beeping Goddess's horn and recieving a new recipe to cook.

By handing over these meals and completing other tasks such as giving a villager scrap to repair a bridge or bounce pad, you gain village reputation. This upgrades your ranking in the community and unlocks new skills like increasing the amount of meals you receive from a successful cook.

You can also upgrade your village ranking by destroying Lina Corp advertisements set up around the world. However, you'll need to progress the story to upgrade Goddess at the shop, to gain new ways to interact with the environment. And if you've found legendary scrap, you can buy even more permanent upgrades.

Although, exploration is just one part of Dosa Divas. The main thing that keeps an RPG fan playing is a well-designed combat system. Dosa Divas creates an interactive rhythm combat system that is used offensively and defensively. Timed inputs are pressed when a star blinks onto the screen, which enhances your attacks or blocks an incoming assault. Both make combat tense and keep you on your toes, as one slip-up where you miss a perfect block can be ruinous.

The chosen systems within Dosa Divas turn-based combat are quite traditional: your party has health bars, SP points to power your abilities, an ultimate bar for limit break like super moves, and items like your crafted meals that can heal you and undo status effects like silence and confusion.

Outerloop Games makes combat even more fulfilling by the inclusion of enemy weaknesses to the food equivalent of elemental attacks. You hold down a button to see vital battle information, then choose which attack aligns with the weakness of Lina's minion; it makes you carefully consider which party member attacks first. You can also power up attacks as each attack grants you a boost to use.

Being tactical becomes more necessary when certain enemies require you to use skills that rapidly attack to lower an enemy's hit counter to zero. This stuns an enemy, a condition the game calls stuffed, to give you multiple turns to attack without response. Getting an enemy to a stuffed state can turn the tide of a battle as it massively increases all damage dealt.

You combine all of these combat features during boss battles. Multiphased combat encounters that requires you to bring all of your learned skills together. Mastering perfect blocks is game changing to avoid damage from normal attacks, when bosses can perform unblockable attacks that do serious damage to your party. These are slightly more strategic encounters, but I never found any boss overly challenging on the default difficulty. This isn't a bad thing, as they do push back enough to make you concentrate.

Although, this was only the case due to completing every optional side activity and battling more of Lina's goons than you theoretically need to. Like any other RPG, you earn experience points after defeating enemies. Once you gain enough xp to level up, every stat is boosted, and then, you get to choose an additional upgrade between health, attack and spirit.

This merging of exploration, cooking and tactical turn-based combat encounters, makes for an engaging and satisfying gameplay loop. Every element of Dosa Divas builds at a good pace and never overstays its welcome, as the story lasts for around ten hours or more. And with a fun platinum to obtain, it's a really fun and focused RPG.

However, after the visually distinct Thirsty Suitors and all of Outerloop Games' previous works, I had high expectations for the visual style of the game. Choosing an isometric, more zoomed out camera means a change in art style was necessary to create a clear readability for the player. Dosa Divas uses a chunkier cartoony art style for the 3D character models and the environments. At times, the environments reminded me of the curved edges of a plasticine stop motion movie. It's all matched effortlessly with vibrant colours that stand out where necessary.

Image: Dosa Divas - Samara, Amani, Goddess

This extends to the mech, Goddess's customisation options. You can change the look of Goddess's armour when you unlock new pieces throughout the story. It isn't a feature I used as I liked the normal look of the mech, but for those that like customisation, there's a nice amount to choose from.

This art style also works perfectly during the cooking segments, where crispy dosas, wraps and sandwiches all look like accurate but stylised versions of their real-world counterparts.

Dosa Divas' 3D models works so well due to the expressive animations during platforming, cooking and combat. Goddess is given so much personality as it double jumps and flaps it's arms like a chicken, and Samara flings a wok into an enemy and keeps batting it back. Every detail draws you into the world.

However, Dosa Divas also zooms in on large animated 2D character portraits whenever main conversations happen. More detailed character renditions that help you focus on the story and dialogue options on offer.

But what really makes the narrative shine is the talented voice actors. The stand outs are Zehra Fazal as Samara, Christine Rose Schermerhorn as Amani, and Farah Merani as Lina; each deliver a nuanced performance as the sisters, creating a believable and complicated sibling relationship. Emphasised during the emotional flashbacks after completing each level. Honest moments that extend a whole breadth of emotions.

And everything is supported by the South Asian inspired score that cements a clear identity to the sisters' home. Exploration is given a relaxing soundscape. And Lina's billboards spout her corporate propaganda that helps you stay within the familial conflict. Whereas, combat becomes propulsive and is complimented by punchy audio drops when you attack an enemy or use a special move.

And for those who find rhythm combat a challenge or just don't like it as a gameplay system, you can tweak it's settings in the menu or set it to auto to avoid it altogether. There's also difficulty options for those that want them. But I found the default difficulty progressed nicely for a shorter RPG.

For the length and scale of the game, Dosa Divas is a very enjoyable experience. It performed impeccably on Playstation 5 Pro. The only downsides were some characters' backstories would've benefited from extra depth. Although, I must compliment how disabilities were discussed in conversations. The discussions felt realistic and showed how awkward and uncomfortable such discussions can be, when to the disabled person, their disability is simply a part of them, and want it to be seen that way.

Dosa Divas is another indie turn-based RPG that is very enjoyable and unique, with Outerloop Games' proud South Asian inspirations running through its core and their constant improvement as a studio. It feels like Outerloop Games have been able to take the systems of Thirsty Suitors and make something artistically expressive and narratively thoughtful that has something to say, and more importantly, something worth listening to.

Dosa Divas Review

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