A fantasy game that is all too real

A review of Dosa Divas, a role-playing game about what it means to do good, from a studio trying to do things right. Says its director: “For us, a sort of success [is whether we can] make another.”

Dosa Divas. Screenshot: Outerloop Games

“There was a Sri Lankan place, not many in Seattle, that opened up during the pandemic,” the video game developer Chandana Ekanayake recently recalled.

“Food was excellent. I got to support this place as much as possible. They lasted a year and had to shut down, which was unfortunate.”

“There’s a Vietnamese place we would overtip,” he remembered. Ekanayake just wanted it to remain open.

“I love this place. It's close to the house. And I would make sure we're spending more than we probably should. But I want to make sure that they are also staying around, and luckily, they are.”

Hardships have shaped Ekanayake’s work as the co-founder and creative director of Outerloop Games: hardships in small businesses, in this economy, in capitalism, in the lives of people whose cultures are being mixed into the rest of North America.

The studio works to create games that empathize, sympathize, resonate, and self-reflect with the awareness of everything going on in the world, while still figuring out a sense of good, a sense of justice to aid marginalized folks who have been going through extremely tough times.

Outerloop’s latest is Dosa Divas, a role-playing game released last month for consoles and PC. It’s an interactive tale of sisters Samara and Amani and their food truck/mech Goddess, as they fight corporate lawyers and cops in turn-based combat. They gather ingredients from their surroundings to whip up dishes, while also trying to right previous wrongs with old friends, coworkers, and family members, after a decade away.

It’s a game about all those hardships and what people can do about them.

It hit me hard.