A Taste of the Past
A Taste of the Past looks like a cozy cooking game about chopping vegetables and frying noodles. It plays like a quiet conversation with people who are no longer alive. Mei boards a train after losing the one recipe card that mattered to her, and instead of a kitchen tutorial she gets a dream full of relatives who died before she was born, each waiting to tell her something about the dish she's trying to save.
| Protagonist | Mei |
|---|---|
| Genre | Narrative cooking game |
| Setting | A train, in a dream |
| Dish at the center of the story | Longevity noodles |
| Approximate length | 30 minutes |
| Browser version | WebGL, no fullscreen support |
Losing the Recipe Card
The setup for A Taste of the Past is small on purpose. Mei wants to cook the longevity noodles her mother made her every birthday, and the only copy of the recipe is gone. She falls asleep on a train and finds her mother's side of the family riding in the same carriage, generations of them, each holding a piece of the recipe she's missing.
There's no combat, no fail state, no timer pushing toward a better ending. The tension comes from Mei not knowing these people and having to sit with them anyway, because they're the only way she'll finish the dish before she wakes up.
Every ancestor Mei meets is really a stand-in for a piece of her mother she never got to ask about directly. The train becomes less a destination than a waiting room for grief.
What the Minigames Actually Ask of You
The cooking itself runs through short, deliberately simple minigames. None of them are hard in a mechanical sense, and that's the point beginners miss going in expecting a real cooking-sim challenge.
Players who rush through these segments to get back to dialogue tend to miss small details built into each one, like the pacing of the knife strokes or the way the frying step slows down instead of speeding up as it goes.
- Gathering ingredients from ancestors on the train
- Chopping vegetables for the noodle dish
- Frying the noodles themselves
- Wrapping soup dumplings in a later scene
The difficulty curve, such as it is, moves from physical tasks toward emotional ones. Chopping and frying are simple enough to do without thinking, which frees up attention for the conversations happening around them.
The Detail You Only Notice by Playing
One thing that doesn't come across in a description: dialogue from Mei's living perspective is typed out with a typing sound effect, while every line from her dead relatives appears with the sound of a pen. It's easy to miss on a first playthrough, but once you notice it you start listening differently to who's speaking.
A completionist chasing every optional line of dialogue will end up spending more time talking than cooking, while someone playing straight through on a lunch break still gets the full arc, since the story isn't built around replay value or branching outcomes.
Players and reviewers have taken to calling the carriage Mei rides through her dream the memory train. It's a fitting name, since every stop introduces someone from further back in her family than the last.
An Honest Note on Pacing
Not every scene lands with the same weight. A few rough edges show up consistently across playthroughs:
- Some ancestor conversations run long for how little they add to Mei's search for the recipe
- The shift between lighthearted cooking and heavier grief dialogue can feel abrupt
- The ending arrives quickly once the dumpling-wrapping scene wraps up
It's a short, personal project, and it shows in places where the tone doesn't settle before moving on. None of that undoes what it's trying to do, but the emotional turns sometimes arrive faster than the story earns them.
Anyone hoping for more recipes will find A Taste of the Past deliberately narrow. The longevity noodles are the whole point.
Is A Taste of the Past sad?
Yes, though it isn't grim. It deals directly with losing a parent, but the tone stays warm because Mei's relatives are mostly gentle with her, even the ones she's meeting for the first time.
Can you play A Taste of the Past in a browser?
There is a WebGL browser version. It doesn't support fullscreen, though, so the picture stays boxed into the embedded player window rather than filling the screen.
Do you need to know how to cook to enjoy A Taste of the Past?
No. The chopping, frying, and dumpling-wrapping minigames are built for anyone to pick up in seconds; none require real cooking knowledge, since they're there to carry the story rather than test a skill.
By the end, the recipe Mei was chasing matters less than the people she had to ride the train with to find it. A Taste of the Past doesn't stretch that idea past its welcome, and the longevity noodles she finally makes feel earned precisely because getting there meant sitting through every one of her ancestors' stories first.