Folk Horror Hot Pot Restaurant Game Announced for PC
The announcement pairs a mundane restaurant-management loop with a Taiwan-region ghost marriage folk custom, a combination the developer has not yet explained in the story.
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
Indie developer Yukinoshin announced HOT POT FOR THE DEAD | Ghost Marriage Hot Pot Restaurant, a short horror adventure game for PC, and opened its Steam store page. Players run a late-night hot pot restaurant while investigating the previous manager's disappearance over a seven-day shift. The game uses first-generation PlayStation-style graphics and lasts about one to two hours.
The game is set in the only hot pot restaurant still operating in a late-night shut-down shopping street. The previous manager vanished before reaching the seventh day, and the player takes over as successor, taking orders and serving specified hot pots to customers while investigating what happened.
Strange occurrences creep in during routine business, but the player cannot interrupt service. One example is an old woman who orders only with paper without speaking. Another is a red envelope that appears on the order board with no memory of it being placed there.
The ghost marriage in the title refers to a folk custom from the Taiwan region, where a deceased unmarried woman is provided with a husband. A paper with the woman's birth date and time is placed in a red envelope and left on the roadside; the man who picks it up is asked to marry the envelope's owner. How this custom will factor into the story is not yet clear.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.