Forgotten Feasts: The Game — Every Mile Has a Cost

A route becomes a set of choices

The idea for Forgotten Feasts: The Game grew out of forgottenfeasts.com and the work of Craig “Burnie” Burns. The game is a Foodflix Media property within its FoodFlix Play division, inspired by Burnie’s original Forgotten Feasts property. Its place in the JaxonGlobal Lab Log reflects Christian’s role as a co-owner of Foodflix Media. This dispatch follows that creative step into interactive storytelling: the game’s setting, its design, and the choices it puts in the player’s hands.

The game’s setting is spring 1336. Its public preview traces a route from Wuchang to Constantinople through 22 waypoints, presenting a journey of roughly 5,624 miles. Those are the coordinates of the experience being built: a long crossing with changing terrain and competing demands.

A route on a screen is easy to admire. A route with a caravan attached asks harder questions. How much can you carry? What needs protecting? What happens when a promising shortcut puts supplies under pressure? The design opportunity is to make the distance felt through choices, rather than leave it as a number beside a progress bar.

Food belongs at the center of that design. A caravan has to eat. Resources have to last. Trade and hospitality create opportunities, while the conditions of the journey limit what is possible. The player’s attention moves between the next stretch of road and the destination still far ahead.

Choose the company you keep

The preview introduces four characters with different strengths. Li Wei, the lead merchant, brings an eye for trade. Rostam, the caravan master, knows the demands of the crossing. Kael, the guard captain, centers protection. Anya, the scribe, brings recipes, diplomacy, and the value of a record.

Their roles make the journey personal. A decision about supplies can become a decision about whose judgment to trust. A commercial opportunity might look different to the person responsible for getting everyone through the next stretch safely.

This is where a historical setting becomes useful to game design. It creates a world in which people, resources, and routes depend on one another. The game can invite curiosity about that world while remaining clear that its characters and mechanics belong to an interactive interpretation.

An invitation to the caravan

Forgotten Feasts: The Game gives FoodFlix Play its own visual language: a terrain map, gold route markers, and illustrated characters. It connects to the wider Foodflix family through food and storytelling, while giving the games division an identity people can recognize immediately.

The current public destination is a preview and an invitation to join the caravan. It introduces the route, the cast, and the premise; it should not be mistaken for an announcement that the complete game has launched.

For the Lab, the next standard is simple: the finished experience has to make its choices matter. The map gets people interested. The relationships between those choices are what will give the journey a reason to stay with them.