SOpa (which means “soup”) is a game about a boy who goes to get a potato for his grandmother and stumbles upon a magical world at the back of the pantry. “The pantry seems to keep getting bigger and bigger,” explains creative director Juan Castañeda. “And when you’re about to grab the sack of potatoes, you’re pulled into another world of fantasy and magical realism. So you go on all these adventures and meet all these different characters, but at the end of the day, all you’re trying to do is get that potato for your grandmother’s soup.”
As far as video game quests go, this one is incredibly mundane, and makes for a refreshing change from rescuing princesses in castles and saving lands in peril. However, you soon realise there’s more to it than just missing potatoes. “There’s another layer to the story, and that’s what the game is really about,” says Castaneda. “Every time you go back to the kitchen, things will have changed in unexpected ways, and every time you embark on an adventure, you’ll pick up clues about a mysterious traveller who passed through here long ago.”
There’s an ancient mystery underlying your initial search for cooking ingredients, and as the game progresses, Castaneda says, elements of magical realism come to the fore and it becomes “a little bit trickier to be sure what’s fantasy and what’s reality.”
Sopa is being developed by StudioBando, a team of around a dozen developers, all working remotely in countries including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina and the United States. They previously worked on the mobile title The best ghost gameBut Soup is the studio’s first release for consoles and PC. Castaneda is from Colombia, the birthplace of magical realism author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and says Marquez’s novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, have been a major influence on Soup.
“He’s kind of a national treasure, a national hero,” says Castañeda, noting that Marquez’s presence is everywhere in the country. “We grew up hearing all his stories, we grew up reading all his books. It’s something that’s deeply rooted in every Colombian person.”
Colombia is also deeply rooted in Sopa. Castaneda says the game’s setting is based on his own grandmother’s house, in a rural Colombian town that was absorbed by a sprawling city. “It’s a traditional house, colonial in design, with a big patio,” he says, and it was a place he recalls was always full because of his grandmother’s 15 children. “Several of them had children of their own, so there was always activity in that house,” he recalls. “Every room was always full.”
Instead, Soup offers a more sedate experience, at least at first. The young protagonist, Miho, is bored while lazing around watching TV at her grandmother’s house, only reluctantly getting up to help with the soup. The show she’s watching, The Voltage Templars, is an homage to Power Rangers, which Castañeda remembers from her childhood and was just one of many American and Japanese shows that flooded Colombian television.
“At that time there wasn’t a lot of Colombian media, apart from the radio,” she says. “And as a kid, you wanted the foreign yogurt ice cream, you wanted to watch the American series and read the foreign books. And you ignored a lot of the things around you that were really beautiful and special.” A reconnection with one’s own culture forms the basis of Sopa, as Miho immerses herself in worlds influenced by Latin American traditions. “Throughout these adventures, you pick up on little bits of these traditions and you’re learning to appreciate them.”
Sopa seems to be part of a trend, alongside games like 2023’s award-winning Venba, about reconnecting with cultural traditions through cooking, and Indonesian hit A Space for the Unbound. We’re seeing creators portray cultures outside of the US, Europe, and Japan, which previously tended to dominate video games. “Maybe people around the world are feeling similar things to me, and they’re telling their own personal stories from their own places,” says Castaneda.
In addition to García Márquez, Castañeda says key influences for Soup include The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Pinocchio, and most notably, the Pixar film Coco. The idea originated about a decade ago, but work on the game has been ongoing for about five years, starting with the studio’s three co-founders: Castañeda, Holt, and co-writer Nelson Guevara. “Each of us basically moved back in with our parents to try to finish this and keep our costs down,” Castañeda says.
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“It’s not like we had saved a lot of money from our previous successes or anything like that. It was actually a pretty modest start and quite gruelling. It was very difficult to get support for a long time.” He pitched the game to publishers, but was repeatedly criticized as companies either didn’t want to believe the team was capable of achieving their ambitions or doubted there was a market for it.
On the other hand, Castañeda says there has been no shortage of support from colleagues in the gaming industry. “Even though, for a long time, no one was backing the project and helping us make it happen, on a personal level, there were a lot of people in the gaming industry who supported us, believed in it, and helped us get it in front of people.” The big breakthrough was a meeting with Microsoft. “We pitched the game and I really had no idea what they thought, because it wasn’t even a video call, it was just audio,” Castañeda recalls. “And then we got an email in the middle of the night a week later, saying they loved the project and wanted to support it.
“I remember calling my colleagues in tears to tell them the news, because I had just been talking to our advisor that day and I said, ‘Am I being stupid? Planet Earth seems to indicate that we shouldn’t make this game, nothing is happening to us. ‘ And that same night, we got the news that they would help us with an initial investment.”
That was last fall, amid a period of upheaval in the video game industry during which layoffs and studio closures have been commonplace and “everything around us was crashing and burning, and it was just terrifying,” Castañeda says. Maybe Sopa isn’t just a game about reconnecting with Latin American traditions, then: maybe it’s a game about persistence and, above all, hope.
