Girthy Oversized Chef's Knife

You worked yourself into an early grave. A bored goddess dug you back out, and the terms are short: every month, you cook her a meal worth her time.

She dropped you in Emberdale, a village in a world where the animals are wrong, the vegetables are worse, men are scarce, and the women are very generously equipped. Your knife came with you. Start there.

GOCK is a visual novel welded to a card game. You gather with cards, cook what you gather, and the cooking cheats the cards back.

How it works

• Exploring. The map runs on modified blackjack. Hit for another ingredient, stand to bank the hand, bust and walk home with nothing. Colour runs and flushes pay extra, so the safe stand is rarely the good one.
• Cooking. Haul the ingredients back to a kitchen and cook. Recipes take substitutes when you are short. After the first goddess meal your recipes are perfected: one free dish a day, your pick.
• Cheats. Eating a perfected dish arms a cheat you spend on the cards: add one, subtract one, flip a 2 into a 5, turn a card red, turn a suit to hearts. Missing a threshold by a single point stops being bad luck and starts being a decision.
• Sealing. Monsters are not stabbed, they are sealed. Every monster carries seal slots with rules on them, exactly two spades, three cards that are not spades, one red card, and you close them with the hand you drew.
• The Cindervale Depths. Seven floors of branching nodes under the mountain. You pick the way down and you pick when to leave with what you are carrying.
• The goddess meal. At the end of the month you cook for Elyria. The plate matters. So does how you behave at her table.

The village

• Astrid, the drakan blacksmith who rents you her spare room. Horns, red eyes, skin that runs hot, an apron and nothing above it. She forges your tools, and in 0.17 you talk her into building an oven.
• Mira, the half moon elf who owns the Lusty Wench and cannot cook a single thing. The inn's reputation is her problem. Teaching her is yours.
• Kael, the nature elf running the general store. Buys, sells, invents, blushes at roughly everything. Two speeds: stammering wreck, or a hundred words a second about alchemy.
• Helga, the blushcow-kin farmer on the outskirts. Fills a doorway. Feeds you before you can get a sentence out.

• Elyria, the goddess, and the reason you have a pulse. She wants twelve meals. She has not said what happens after the twelfth.