ASMR Food Experience is an ear-tingling sim game

Leaving no niche untapped

The great simulation flood continues to ebb and flow on Steam, and sometimes, a curious new highly niche PC game washes ashore. (Thanks, Rock, Paper, Shotgun.) You might think you’ve seen it all by now, but then there’s this: ASMR Food Experience, a game about running a restaurant while (hopefully pleasant) sounds put you in a daze.

The trailer looks proof-of-concept-y, as is often the way, but I like the concept.

And looking over the screenshots — a tomato being slowly sliced, a filet sizzling on the stovetop, a splash of water hitting a glass of ice cubes— I can just “hear” these images. Depending on the person, “ASMR sounds” can be soothing or offputting, and I tend to fall in the former group more often than the latter. A whole game of ’em? Interesting.

The pitch for ASMR Food Experience is more involved than the footage suggests.

“Your task will be to run the restaurant and ensure its bright future,” notes Gameparic. “Various kinds of challenges will await you, making it difficult to achieve your goals: from unruly customers to ensuring fresh deliveries of products and reacting to changing weather — all this will take place in the rhythms of the sounds that surround you.”

As for the audio, “you will have full control over what sounds are in it: nature, cooking, cleaning, conversations, or street sounds.” ASMR Food Experience is in the “early stage” of game development, and the team is open to “suggestions and ideas.”

We’ll see if there’s enough niche-within-a-niche interest to warrant ASMR Food Experience ever coming to fruition; so many simulation games are “announced” and fail to materialize. This one’s a novelty, for sure. Worst case, I got a kick out of the trailer.

If “being a stone in the forest” is more your scene, well, there’s Mindfulness Simulator.