izigame.me

My dream job is not having a job. I don't dream of labor. Some of my steam game choices would beg to differ though. City building sim, flight sim, cooking sim, minimum wage super market employee sim (on whishlist). However in this specific case, it's a minimalistic waiter/cook sim kinda thing that caught my attention - and I gotta say it CAN be quite entertaining.
One of my childhood aspirations was food (not to be confused with the logical profession having to do with food, the chef). What I mean is that I loved to eat and I my favorite TV channel was the food-network. I BINGED the thing and I really wanted to have a thematic and rather stereotypical Italian restaurant. You know the one. Red and white checkered tablecloth, thin bread sticks on the table. Olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the table always. The smell of cheap pizza permeating every square inch of the establishment. It was a noble, yet unrealistic dream to have for me - and this is where games like these come in.
Cook, Serve, Delicious allows me to scratch this itch just a tiny bit. The game is essentially a rags to riches story (bare bones). You are given a run down restaurant and the ubiquitous task of fulfilling shareholder's expectations. Make it work, make it profitable. The games mechanics are serviceable. As much as an indie game could muster back in 2012. The game give you 20 starting recipes that you can choose to serve for the day and each has their own modifier. You can't serve the same food twice in a row or have too many greasy items on the menu (or suffer an xp penalty if you do) - although if, for example, all the foods are breakfast items, you get a small boost of customer popularity. It's a quaint little system that gives some depth to the player choice in the game.
The gameplay itself can get hectic as heck, featuring 8 cooking stations that are used to serve food simultaneously. you have to be strategic because if you choose many foods that are complex in its constitution or have several possible topping options, you're going to get wrecked. The feedback of each action feels really great. The game has this cutesy visual style and minimalistic voice acting that gives it a lot of charm (in a 2012 kind of way) and the soundbites that are used for actions are designed according to the food. It adds to the satisfaction of completing each dish. Slapping together a salad for a customer kinda sounds literally like slapping together a salad. It's nice. The food preparation is intertwined with mandatory restaurant chores like cleaning the dishes and taking out the trash which sort of throw a wrench into the tiny little cog machine that is your restaurant. It gets tiring really fast and it adds to the gameplay fatigue of this game - which builds up really fast. This is unfortunately its biggest flaw. Twenty dishes gets old and the gameplay's difficult appeal kinda wanes off and starts to become boring. To me there aren't many motivators to keep playing past a week or so in game.
I remember hearing this game being dubbed as the dark souls of cooking games (which I kind of see lol), back when saying that was novel and hip - and I think it's cool that this game exists. The game does have a couple of sequels which improve and mix up a lot of the dynamics and gameplay, but in essence they are all the same game - which is not necessarily a bad thing.
All in all I could see myself giving Cook, Serve, Delicious a respectable 3 foods out of 5 🥨🥩🍣