A recipe for magical realism: Gabriel García Márquez and a video game about potatoes

The designer of Sopa: The Tale of the Stolen Potato explains how his Colombian background informs the forthcoming game

Sopa (the Spanish for “soup”) is a game about a young boy who goes to fetch a potato for his grandma, then stumbles upon a magical world at the back of the food cupboard. “The pantry seems to get longer and longer,” explains creative director Juan Castañeda. “And when you’re about to grab the sack of potatoes, you get pulled into this other world of fantasy and magical realism. So you go on all these adventures, and meet all these different characters, but at the end of the day, you’re really just trying to get that potato for your grandma’s soup.”

As video game quests go, this is fabulously mundane and makes a refreshing change from rescuing princesses in castles and saving lands in peril. However you soon realise there is more to it all than just lost spuds. “There’s this other layer to the story, and that’s what the game is really about,” says Castañeda. “Each time you come back to the kitchen, things will have changed in unexpected ways, and each time you go off on an adventure, you’re going to be picking up these hints about a mysterious traveller who went through this way long ago.”