Family Reunion is a dinnertime simulation game that captures the wonder and boredom of being a loosely disciplined 7-year-old

A food fight against time itself

I first played Family Reunion at Gamescom Latam last week, which in hindsight was a bit of trek, considering the demo is right there on Itch and Steam. It’s good fun, though: a unique and chaotic time-attack adventure game, in which you play a disinterested child forced to entertain themselves throughout an interminable family meal, and rendered in the hand-doodled style that we all have before we learn how to properly hold a pen.

Mercifully, the feast – or in my case the starter, as that’s all the demo covered – mercifully does not take place in real time. But without your stubby-handed intervention it’ll last even longer, as the primary antagonist here is neither the family, nor the food, but the clock. At first it’ll creep down in fractions of fractions of a second, cheekily recreating the sensation of being stuck at a table against your will. Your goal, then, is to entertain yourself, thereby speeding up the pace of the clock until it chimes for the next course.

Just like in school, you begin by choosing a personality. The Introvert lacks small-talking skills and the energy to leave the table for long periods, but is a master daydreamer who can imagine their way to fantasised time-passing. The Chatty isn’t so creative, and is also a weakling, but is the only class that can hold a non-nonsense conversation with the familials. And the Adventurer specialises in being an energetic little shit, being able to roam the furthest around the house (in a rudimentary dungeon-crawly minigame) and to amuse themselves by flinging dinnerware around.

I went with the Introvert, because a) it’s all I know and b) I liked the idea of covering my empty plate with an army of imaginary aliens. That opportunity came almost immediately: more grounded actions (like eating or knocking over the salt shaker) will hasten the clock slightly, but such mundane pursuits were no match for my childish boredom. Thus, aliens.

Repeated ability uses eventually unlock other fidgeting skills, but all three archetypes will eventually need to go exploring. This is where, I’m ashamed to say, my run began going off the rails. Early excursions were, despite my Introvert’s lack of energy, fruitful: I found a pen that would let me draw on the table, further tightening up the time dilation. A discovered pamphlet also turned me, instantaneously, in a Flat Earther, producing an excellent visual gag of my character’s rotund face appearing permanently squashed. These bounties, however, hid terrible risks. Repeated ink vandalism, and my occasional ennui-outbursts about my parents being a bunch of sphere-worshipping rubes, both raised the tensions at the table and forced them into a more attentive watch, cutting off exploration and slowing the clock back down to a crawl.

In response, I’d act out further, spamming imaginations and making amateur (read: incorrect) analyses of the family’s behaviour, but this invited further scrutiny and even prompted targeted interventions by dad or granddad – these acting as RPG-ish crunch decision moments on how, specifically, to react. Even without the pressure to finish the course within a certain time, the wealth of interactions and lack of meaningful cooldowns meant that what started as slow-curious prodding at soup and salt had turned into a breathless push-and-pull between my mental conjurations and the game’s seemingly endless ability to react and respond to them. So ensconced was I in the duel that I failed to notice I was about to win it, ultimately bringing the three-hour-long timer to zero in just over 17 real-life minutes.

"Is that good?" I asked Family Reunion’s solo developer, Leandro Waibe.

"Yeah," he shrugged. "I added the time for fun."

Fun indeed. No release date on this one yet, though it’s aiming for an early access launch by the end of 2026.