Imagine the reactive combat of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, mixed with a hearty helping of The Outer Worlds 2’s favorite conglomerate Auntie’s Choice. Then add a generous ladle of South Asian seasoning to the mixture, and you’ve got Dosa Divas. This turn-based, narrative RPG from Outerloop Games (the team behind 2023’s Thirsty Suitors) follows sisters Amani and Samara on their mission to take down a fast-food empire. Along the way, they’ll reunite with old friends and reconnect their fractured community by cooking delicious food. Dosa Divas will satisfy the appetites of time-starved RPG fans with its innovative combat system and charming, colorful world. Though the dialogue can occasionally veer into cringeworthy territory, it’s a journey worth taking.
Samara and Amani are accompanied on their journey by Goddess, a colorful, ancient mech they discovered years ago beneath their family-run restaurant on the island of Meyndish. (Get it?) As the story progresses, we learn more about the family and friends who helped make the restaurant a success — and the clashes that eventually led to its collapse. After the restaurant flopped, the youngest sister, Lina, started a food corporation called Linaworks, which specializes in tubes filled with mush. Not only have folks on the island forgotten how to cook, they’ve also lost sight of the way meals can bring friends and family together. It’s up to you to remind them, while undoing Lina’s corporate takeover.
The core gameplay loop of Dosa Divas consists of exploration, cooking, and combat. As you explore each area and meet locals hankering to taste your dishes, you’ll find unique ingredients that you can use to craft new recipes. The food-prep minigames are familiar, though pleasantly so: swirling a pan with the analog sticks, rapid button presses to apply seasoning, and timing tidy slices with a chef’s knife. Perform well enough and you’ll create extra portions of each dish, so you’ll have one to offer a villager and some leftovers to keep for yourself. These dishes can be used as consumable items that restore HP, temporarily boost your attack or defense, or cure status ailments.
The cooking minigames help to keep the game’s pacing lively, though other aspects of the system have a few quirks. On several occasions during my playthrough, I attempted to recreate a previous dish, but the UI autofilled incorrect ingredients, or omitted essential items that I had in my inventory. There’s not a streamlined way to recreate a recipe you’ve made before; you’ll have to redo the minigames every time. It’s not a huge pain point, but something that would benefit from further polish.
Combat is where Dosa Divas shines brightest. You’ll control three characters in each battle: Samara, Amani, and the mech Goddess. Each character has their own unique set of basic attacks and special skills, each of which use flavor categories (like spicy, sweet, or sour) in place of familiar RPG element-based attacks. Your opponents are weak to certain flavor types, and exploiting those weaknesses will inflict greater damage and reduce an enemy’s shields, which can be used to inflict a stagger state — here known as “stuffed” — leaving them vulnerable to bonus damage.
Like in Expedition 33, damage dealt and taken varies greatly depending on your timing. Some moves require a timed button hold, while others allow you to rack up long combos with multiple taps. There’s an on-screen prompt to help nail the timing, which is key to success. You’ll need to stay on your toes during enemy attacks too, because simply not bothering to block isn’t really an option. Dosa Divas’s enemies may be corporate stooges, but they hit hard, often for 30-50 percent of an undefended character’s HP. If timing isn’t your thing, there are flexible accessibility options for all the combat and cooking minigames, which allow you to either simplify or completely automate a variety of inputs, from rapid presses to rotating the analog stick. It’s a thoughtful addition that keeps the game approachable to a broad variety of players.
After completing each battle, your party members will gain experience and eventually level up. It’s standard RPG stuff, but there’s a light element of customization that allows you to delegate bonus stat points to either basic attacks, skills, or HP. A second progression system is linked to your reputation in each of the game’s three main regions. You can help the locals by making their favorite recipes, destroying Linaworks advertisements, and repairing broken infrastructure like bridges and ziplines. As you help the community, you’ll unlock new and stronger attacks for each of your party members, along with new exploration tools like the hookshot and drill. I was able to access most of it in the course of a normal playthrough, though there’s plenty more to do for completionists.
While Dosa Divas overall narrative of rebuilding relationships through food is a compelling one, the dialogue is occasionally soapy and overwrought. One of Samara and Amani’s former colleagues, Yomi, nurses a years-long grudge because she never got to try out her recipes at the restaurant. Sure, this would be frustrating, but it’s treated as a life-altering trauma in a way that simply doesn’t feel believable. Other relationships in the game, like the tension between the siblings and their resort-dwelling parents, feel more genuine. That said, Dosa Divas ultimately sticks the landing, uniting the ensemble cast for a satisfying resolution at journey’s end, even if there are a few tonal missteps and ham-fisted lines along the way.
With a tidy 8-10 hour runtime, three unique regions to explore, and dozens of drool-worthy dishes to create, Dosa Divas is an approachable and appealing genre mash-up. It’s a perfectly bite-sized RPG to spend a weekend with.
Dosa Divas comes to Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X, Windows PC, and PlayStation 5 on April 14, 2026. The game was reviewed on Switch 2 using a prerelease download code provided by Outerloop Games. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
