Sopa (the Spanish for “soup”) is a game about a young boy who goes to fetch a potato for his grandma, then stumbles upon a magical world at the back of the food cupboard. “The pantry seems to get longer and longer,” explains creative director Juan Castañeda. “And when you’re about to grab the sack of potatoes, you get pulled into this other 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, you’re really just trying to get that potato for your grandma’s soup.”
As video game quests go, this is fabulously mundane and makes a refreshing change from rescuing princesses in castles and saving lands in peril. However you soon realise there is more to it all than just lost spuds. “There’s this other layer to the story, and that’s what the game is really about,” says Castañeda. “Each time you come back to the kitchen, things will have changed in unexpected ways, and each time you go off on an adventure, you’re going to be picking up these hints about a mysterious traveller who went through this way long ago.”
There is an ancient mystery layered beneath your initial quest for cooking ingredients, and as the game progresses, says Castañeda, the magical realism elements come to the fore and it becomes “a little bit trickier to be sure about what’s fantasy and what’s reality”.
Sopa is being made by StudioBando – a team of around a dozen developers, all working remotely in countries including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina and the US. They previously worked on the mobile title Super Best Ghost Game, but Sopa is the studio’s first release for console and PC. Castañeda is from Colombia, the birthplace of magical realist author Gabriel García Márquez, and he says that Márquez’s novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, have been a huge influence on Sopa.
“He’s a sort of national treasure, a national hero,” Castañeda says, noting that Márquez’s presence is found everywhere in the country. “We grow up hearing all of his stories, we grew up reading all of his books. It’s something that is deeply ingrained in every single Colombian person.”
Colombia is also deeply ingrained in Sopa. Castañeda says the game’s setting is based on his own grandmother’s house, in a rural Colombian town that was swallowed up by an expanding city. “It’s this traditional, colonial house layout, with a big yard,” he says, and it was somewhere he remembers always being busy on account of his grandmother’s 15 children. “Several of them had children of their own, so there was always activity in that house,” he recalls. “Each room was always filled.”
By contrast, Sopa offers a quieter experience, at least at first. The young protagonist, Miho, is bored as he loafs around watching TV at his grandmother’s, only reluctantly rising to help out with the soup. The show he is watching, The Voltage Templars, is a homage to the Power Rangers, which Castañeda remembers from his childhood and was just one of the many US and Japanese shows that flooded Colombian TV.
“There wasn’t very much Colombian media at the time, other than the radio,” he says. “And as a kid, you wanted the foreign frozen yogurt, you wanted to watch the American series and to read the foreign books. And you’d ignore a lot of the things that were around you that were really beautiful and special.” A reconnection with one’s own culture forms the basis for Sopa, as Miho is plunged into worlds informed by Latin American traditions. “Throughout these adventures, you’re picking up on little pieces of these traditions and you’re learning to appreciate them.”
Sopa seems to be part of a trend, alongside games such as 2023’s award-winning Venba, about reconnecting with cultural traditions through cooking, and the Indonesian hit A Space for the Unbound. We’re seeing creators depict cultures outside the US, Europe and Japan, which have previously tended to dominate video games. “Maybe people around the world are feeling similar things as I am, and they are telling their own personal stories of their own places,” says Castañeda.
As well as García Márquez, Castañeda says that key influences on Sopa include The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Pinocchio and, in particular, the Pixar film Coco. The idea originated around a decade ago, but work on the game has been ongoing for about five years, beginning with the studio’s three co-founders: Castañeda, Holt and co-writer Nelson Guevara. “Each of us essentially moved back in with our parents to try and get this done and keep our costs low,” says Castañeda.
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“It wasn’t like we had saved up a ton of money from our prior successes or anything like that. It really was a pretty modest start, and pretty gruelling. It was very difficult to get support for a long time.” He pitched the game to publishers but received knockback after knockback, with companies either unwilling to believe the team were able to pull off their ambitions, or doubtful that there was a market for it.
Then again, Castañeda says there has been no shortage of support from colleagues in the games sector. “Even though, for a long time, nobody would get behind the project and help us get it made, at a personal level, there were so many people from the game industry who were supportive and believed in it and helped us get it in front of people.” The big breakthrough was a meeting with Microsoft. “We pitched the the game and I really had no idea what they thought, because it wasn’t even a video call, it was just audio,” recalls Castañeda. “And then we got an email in the middle of the night a week later, saying that they loved the project and wanted to support it.
“I remember calling my teammates in tears to break the news, because just that day I’d been speaking with our advisor, saying, ‘Am I just being dumb here? Planet Earth seems to be indicating that we shouldn’t be making this game, nothing is happening for us.’ And that same night, we got the news that they’d help us out with an initial investment.”
That was last autumn, in the middle of an ongoing period of upheaval in the games industry during which redundancies and studio closures have been a regular occurrence and “everything around us was crashing and burning, and just terrifying”, says Castañeda. Perhaps Sopa isn’t only a game about reconnecting with Latin American traditions, then: perhaps it’s a game about persistence and, above all, hope.