Nour: Play with Your Food Review (PS5)

If you’ve a taste for the experimental, oddball games from PlayStation Network’s early days, Nour: Play with Your Food might satisfy that craving. This unusual title is a digital celebration of food, though certainly not table manners; it provides several gastronomical vignettes and lets you mess around to your heart’s — and your stomach’s — content.

It forgoes any objectives or plot, resembling a digital plaything more than a traditional game. Nour gives you 20 levels, each focusing on different meals or cooking processes. These become the backdrop for you to get creative with food, either attempting to arrange delicious-looking meals or create pure culinary chaos. Pleasingly realistic 3D models are all affected by physics, and a selection of tools and spells let you manipulate things even further; turning food various colours, changing shapes and sizes, making everything dance, setting stuff on fire, and plenty more.

There’s no doubt this novel little game will keep you going for a while. Even without a tangible end goal, there’s absolutely some fun to be had just mucking around with food — stacking burgers into the stratosphere, flinging tapioca balls into a cup of milky tea, or throwing stuff into a microwave and watching the results. As mentioned, you can go a little crazy, spawning hundreds of objects and having them form constellations, or you can aim for intricacy, creating delicious-looking American breakfasts or bowls of ramen. Whatever you fancy, a basic photo mode lets you snap Instagram-worthy shots.

However, Nour is more a quick snack than a filling main course. For us, it’s like a packet of crisps; lots of flavour and satisfying while it lasts, but it’s all over very quickly. You can nosh through this game in an hour or two, after which you’re given more ways to mess with each level, but there’s little reason to return for seconds. It’s a neat novelty, it makes solid use of the DualSense’s features, and it looks and sounds great. Ultimately, though, it didn’t hold our attention for long. Of course, everyone’s taste buds are different, so you may enjoy toying with this endlessly, but for us, it’s no more than a yummy appetiser.