Dosa Divas is a flavourful RPG that's also about family and being self-sustainable

Outerloop Games prides itself on being a minority-led, fully distributed indie game studio that creates accessible games with depth about underrepresented cultures and themes. (See how other standout indie game devs are doing similar inspiring work.)

The developer really came to my attention with its last game, Thirsty Suitors, a narrative-based game that was like a cross between Scott Pilgrim and Bollywood musicals with the stylish RPG battles of Persona 5. Its themes of family, food, and culture were also really strong, which carry over to its upcoming game Dosa Divas, though in practice it's actually a lot more than just, say, Thirsty Suitors 2. The premise is, however, no less eye-catching.

"I had the idea during Thirsty Suitors on a Miro board, and it was about two aunties in a mech," creative director Chandana Ekanayake tells me. "The concept in my head was too fun to explore - what does that mean? Who are they? What's the world? We have to explain a lot more because it's a kind of sci-fi setting with a whole bunch more lore to figure out."

To sum up, you play as two sisters, Samara and Amani, who, with their mech Goddess, are on a journey to visit their family, but along the way also visit other towns being taken over by an evil fast food empire, which also happens to be run by their youngest sister, Lina. It gets complicated, to put it mildly (which is ironic, as the studio cheekily refers to the game as having a spicy narrative).

"We like the idea of there being two chefs that are running around with a food truck mech and people are hungry for various things," says Ekanayake. "The whole game is themed around flavourful ingredients, and skills also have a flavour type, so if you match a skill to an enemy's weakness, you can get them into a stuffed state."

Food isn't just for buffing your party members, but a key part is also cooking dishes, such as the titular dosas, a crepe-like South Indian street dish, for people who have forgotten how to cook for themselves after being enticed by Lina Meals' quick and convenient fast food. It's a message that comes through when you come to a fishing village where the villagers are going hungry, despite there being fish everywhere, perhaps a blunt metaphor for wider issues.

"There's a scene in the demo where the villagers are like, 'We got rid of all our pots, we don't know what to do with them anymore'. It's this in lots of sectors of the real world. Similarly, in the games space, a lot of small studios bought up into bigger studios, and we're now also seeing a kind of collapse of that, which isn't sustainable over the long term. We wanted to try to tackle that as a theme as well, but with food."

While the style of Dosa Divas might feel familiar to fans of Thirsty Suitors, not just because of the delicious 2D food art drawn by the studio's concept artist Vijay Krish, or returning voice actors, albeit cast in very different roles, there's actually quite a structural and aesthetic change required.

There's more a traditional RPG quest, which sees the trio journey to different towns - don't go thinking a whole world map, as the studio is keeping its scope at a sustainable size - so there's more level design involved to make each location distinct, such as the fishing village, an underground one buit on a giant tree, and a more affluent town with huge McMansions. However, Ekanayake also says that these locations are designed with a little more abstraction; evidently, the way the fishing village is presented as a series of interconnected isometric floating islands.

"We pushed for more stylised, mostly because the camera pulls back more, so what you lend to the art style is being chunkier," he explains. "We pushed a lot more of the graphic 2D elements. In Thirsty Suitors, it was a lot more character-driven in the sense that we did close-ups of 3D characters and they were higher fidelity. We're not doing so much here, so we're using the 2D animated portraits for when they're talking, which are bigger on screen, while the characters are smaller on screen."

Ultimately, Dosa Divas feels like an evolution for Outerloop, while still keeping its core themes and the studio's mission statement intact. "It's both a mechanical need to push things further for the story, world-building, art, and animation," he concludes. "There's more expression with the cooking system because you're also combining ingredients, and people have different wants and needs. There's more expression with the battle system, with perfect blocking and attacks, and skills with more mechanical expression. Greater player expression has been the goal with this game."

Dosa Divas is coming to PC and consoles in early 2026.