inbento

Inbento is a pattern-matching game about sorting food into bento boxes and sharing homemade meals. The player is given a small set of puzzle pieces with rice, fish, vegetables, and other bento ingredients which must be arranged to replicate a given recipe. Though initially it resembles jigsaw puzzles, the game quickly introduces special modifier pieces, setting it apart from puzzles where pieces just need to be placed in the same spot as the original picture.

In most levels, the bento box is a 3x3 grid which must be filled with ingredients in accordance with the current recipe. Below the incomplete bento box, the player is presented with a set of pieces. The goal is to match the recipe by the time all of the pieces have been used. The most simple type of pieces are tiles of food, which can either fill empty spots or be stacked over previous tiles, replacing them. A piece can usually be rotated, unless it is marked with black corners, in which case its orientation is locked.

Other pieces display arrows or other icons instead of food, and putting them inside the bento box will modify the existing tiles. Using the appropriate pieces, food tiles can be shifted, swapped, or even duplicated. There’s also a type of piece which enables retrieving some part of the box’s contents and storing it for later use. The challenge mainly comes from finding the right order to apply each piece; the usual way to proceed involves visualizing the intermediary shapes of food which eventually lead to the complete recipe.

Though the late puzzles can be tricky, Inbento is very forgiving. There is an undo button as well as a restart button, and the number of steps required to solve a puzzle is capped by the small number of pieces. The levels are organized in sets of nine, and each set ends with a slide telling the food-centric story of an adorable family of cats.

This description was written by Cay Macres and edited by Oriane Tury.