Game designers put an enormous amount of thought into making virtual food look edible. After all, we know that appetizing visuals affect how satisfying a meal feels, in real life, and (apparently) in code. Which makes it all the more fascinating when that same level of care and attention gets pointed in another direction entirely — whether for a quick Easter egg or a grim narrative beat. These objectively gross video game foods usually aren’t meant to be taken seriously, but let’s take a moment and give them the attention they deserve. From upsetting entrees to a wildly discouraging dessert, here’s a quick look at today’s specials. Bon appétit!
10
Fallout: Giant Radroaches
On the menu: Roasted mutant bug meat that heals you while also raising your radiation level.
Fallout has never been shy about shining a spotlight on the most disgusting aspects of survival. Radroach meat sums that point up quite nicely. Irradiated roaches are plentiful and cheap in Fallout’s post-apocalyptic world, and cooking radroach meat over a campfire turns one of the wasteland’s most common nuisance enemies into an actual source of nutrition…as long as you’re willing to accept a little radiation exposure on the side.
9
Final Fantasy 15: Moist Tomato Cake
On the menu: A single killer tomato, baked into a cake, garnished with more tomato.
Across Final Fantasy 15, Ignis, the party’s resident chef, produces a full cookbook’s worth of mouth-watering meals — sushi, steaks, delicate desserts, we’re hungry just thinking of them. These dishes are usually cooked over a campfire using ingredients Prince Noctis and his pals gathered from the road, which is plausible enough. But then there’s, uh, something else on the table: A damp, spotty red cake made from a Killer Tomato, a real enemy from the game. Plated on the side, you’ll find even more tomato. This thing boosts your stats. And that’s the best thing we can say about that.
8
Death Stranding: Cryptobiotes
On the menu: Squirming alien creatures, eaten raw, straight out of the ground.
Sam Porter Bridges spends most of the first Death Stranding hauling packages across an otherworldly, completely ruined America. As he does, every so often, he pauses to dig up a wriggling little creature from the ground, and he eats it on the spot. Eating one restores stamina immediately, no cooking, no prepwork, just Sam popping it in his mouth and moving on. It’s convenient, if questionable. This isn’t gross in the sense of a terribly-prepared meal or a pixelated mess on a plate, but that squirming snack is a very unsettling detail that makes Sam’s world feel specifically, very deeply, alien.
7
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The Literally Killer Tart
On the menu: A recipe built from cicadas, scorpions, and something called a “munchygrub.”
Mythra has an in-game reputation for terrible cooking. The Literally Killer Tart may be her masterpiece. To make it, you’ll need to gather two Everyman Cicadas, two Gregarious Scorpions, two Sand Upas, two Munchygrubs, and two Motley Cobras. If you’re keeping track, all of these ingredients are insects or reptiles. There’s nothing added to make this “tart” a pastry and not just a bowl of wriggling critters. Unfortunately, this is far from Mythra’s only crime against food. Her repertoire also includes a Pureed Sculpin Parfait (fish and lettuce, yum!) and a Spicy Scorpion Cookie. Eating the Literally Killer Tart does provide in-game buffs — including, somehow, the party’s trust in Mythra. Which raises some questions. Perhaps the bowl of insects tastes far, far better than it looks.
6
Castlevania: Mysterious wall meat
On the menu: A chunk of meat, embedded directly in a dungeon wall. Origin unknown.
Across multiple entries in the Castlevania series, players can find literal cuts of meat hidden inside castle walls. They’re destructible if you hit them with a weapon, and, good news (perhaps the only good news, here?): Eating the meat does restore health. But it is still a chunk of meat from the wall. No in-game text or character dialogue has ever addressed how or why meat exists embedded in stone architecture. But, as it turns out, unexplained dungeon meat may be a trope in video game lore…
5
Vampire Survivors: Floor Chicken
On the menu: A whole roast chicken, just sitting on the ground.
Floor Chicken is a health pickup that restores 30 health points and drops from light sources players destroy mid-battle in Vampire Survivors. Quite the convenient mid-fight snack: Just a whole rotisserie chicken that’s come from nowhere. Which might sound delicious, kind of, in some contexts, but we have to remember that this is a full chicken that’s been on the floor, and we don’t know where it’s been. The Vampire Survivors fanbase considers this a direct reference to Castlevania’s Mysterious Wall Meat (and possibly an ode to even older games as well, like the food pickups in ‘80s arcade games, like Gauntlet). If you collect enough Floor Chickens in Vampire Survivors, fabulous news, you’ll unlock something called The Coop — an entire bonus stage populated by hostile, mutated chickens. Have fun with that!
4
Heavy Rain: Scott Shelby’s scrambled eggs
On the menu: Scrambled eggs, which you can burn to a crisp or serve completely raw. The game doesn’t care which. (It probably should.)
During a story beat in Heavy Rain, private investigator Scott Shelby offers to cook breakfast for Lauren while she showers. You control the cooking process directly. You can choose to burn the eggs or leave them completely raw. When Lauren returns and eats whatever you’ve done, her reaction and dialogue remain identical regardless of what you’ve put on her plate. (I’m wincing just thinking of the sensation of eating a raw plate of runny egg whites). It’s a tiny detail in the story, and an optional one, but it adds to the general odd, depressing vibes of Heavy Rain.
3
Persona 4: Mystery Food X
On the menu: A homemade curry cooked by two characters who have no earthly idea of what belongs in a curry.
Chie and Yukiko, two of Persona 4’s playable characters, periodically cook a curry dish. There is nothing wrong with that. Until you look closer at what ingredients they’re choosing, which include foie gras and sea cucumber, along with other choices that no functioning curry recipe has ever called for. The game never shows you what the finished dish looks like, but you do see other characters eat it and react with visible distress. The fact that the game then refers to the dish as “Mystery Food X” seals its fate — that’s one curry I’m never trying.
2
Cult of the Lamb: Minced Follower Meat
On the menu: One sacrificed cultist, some bones, a 75% chance of making everyone sick.
Minced Follower Meat can be crafted by using the remains of a sacrificed cult member in Cult of the Lamb. It’s described in-game as a grayish-brown mush with visible chunks of meat, served in a bowl made of grass. It’s a disciplinary dish, unfortunately: Forcing a dissenting follower to eat it can scare them back into line…and also, most of the time, make them violently ill. While we won’t get even more into the cannibalism of it all right here, players can also deploy this in an even darker way by killing a dissenter’s friend, cooking the dish, and serving it to the dissenter. As a psychological weapon in a game about running a cult, this is useful. In every other way, this is, potentially, the worst video game food possible.
1
Wolfenstein: Dog Food
On the menu: A bowl of kibble.
Across multiple Wolfenstein titles — from 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D all the way through 2014’s The New Order — protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz consumes bowls of dog food as a regular health pickup. This is not acknowledged. This is never explained. The original game’s source code refers to it internally as “Bad food,” and the item’s entity name, “bo_alpo,” is a direct wink at a real dog food brand from the time period, Alpo. Why’s a war hero eating out of a dog bowl? We may never know. What I do know is that I’m not itching to try it anytime soon.
Decades of games have decided that “gross” and “functional” don’t have to be mutually exclusive when it comes to cuisine…and that, in a virtual offering, perhaps it doesn’t matter what fills a health bar’s as long as it’s getting filled. Or perhaps — you might think, as you’re contemplating a chicken on a grimy dungeon floor or a terrible tomato cake — it really, really does matter. Either way, enjoy the mental image of a video game character being confronted by a bowl of insects and deciding whether or not to tuck in. And, if you read this right before dinner…my apologies.
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