Have you ever wondered how video game food tastes like? The smell of freshly baked Skyrim‘s sweet roll or Portal‘s cake. Or how chewy iguana on a stick from Fallout is. While such cookbooks are getting popular nowadays, there’s also another way to try them: by putting on a VR headset and heading out to the RPG Restaurant.
The aptly named RPG Restaurant is described as a new kind of “VR rating game,” where you get to taste five fantasy video game-inspired dishes and guess what the ingredients are. Yeah, no full-course meal to fill your adventuring needs, but it still sounds like an interesting experience.
After being seated at a table in groups of five, you put on the VR goggles and will find yourself in a dimly-lit bar in another world, just like in isekai anime titles such as KonoSuba or Restaurant to Another World. Then you will be asked to taste one meal at a time and guess which magical world ingredients are used in each menu. It is said that the foods contain specific ingredients to give them an otherworldly, and authentic RPG world feeling to the menu, such as adding slippery ingredients to the “Slime Soup.” According to the official site, these are the menu that’s available to be tasted:
- Welcome Drink: Potions.
- Salad: Priest’s Whimsical Salad.
- Appetizer: Snacks of Darkness.
- Soup: Slime Soup.
- Main Course: Sky Steak.
- Dessert: Magical Lightning Tart.
If you want to try this VR rating game one day though, unfortunately, it was only a limited-time event that was held from June 18 to 20 in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo. Costing 3,000 yen (or around $27), the tickets for the three-day-long virtual reality event were instantly sold out in just three minutes when the pre-order opened on May 27. Even if they run the event again someday after the pandemic cools down, stepping inside the restaurant too won’t be easy.
RPG Restaurant itself is actually one of the contents of ULTRA TOUR, a VR experience program from Japanese event organizer Afro&Co and Psychic VR Lab, a company that specialized in making “lifestyle” virtual reality content such as fashion, art, culture, or music. Are you hoping that one day a local dining place would copy this concept and make a permanent attraction for video game and RPG enthusiasts? Tell us what you think of this unique idea in the comments below.