This
week’s review will be of...
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| Food falling from outside the window, but ignore that. |
Cook,
Serve, Delicious is an indie game with multiple game elements taken from
multiple genres. These genres include action, simulation and strategy, making
this game a tri-brid game… YES TRI-BRID.
The core
mechanics of the game involves the player managing a restaurant (the simulation
part), setting the daily menus (the strategy part), through day shifts of the
player working from 9am to 10pm every day doing every possible position in the
restaurant (the action(?) part) by themselves.
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| No caption needed. Wait... |
Players
start off as being introduced into a 1-star restaurant within a hotel, and is
tasked to work their way up to becoming a 5-star restaurant. The only way the
player can advance up the ranks is by completing goals set by the game (e.g. passing
health inspection tests from a health inspector that stares into your soul).
The food
the player can possibly have on the menu is 5 at the start, this increase to 6
when the player progresses through the game. These 6 (eventually) slots can be
filled up with foods and drinks, ranging from the humble commoner food called pretzel
to the destroy-their-wallet only-for-the-rich-and-classy 5-star lobster.
Basically, selling the food is the player’s main source of income (duh!).
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| The menu of nicely drawn food |
Money
in the game is used to purchase upgrades and kitchen equipment such as fryers,
which unlocks certain foods for purchase. Oh yeah, and food must be bought before
they can be put on the menu (my middle name is Obvious).
The main
gameplay involves the player working a day shift from 9am to 10pm; the days
generally last 15 minutes give or take in real-time. And in these 15 minutes is
where you, the player, single-handedly run the restaurant: take orders, make
the food, cook the food, throw the trash, set rat traps, and flush toilets. The
part that varies the most and is not always the same day in day out is the food
itself. A pretzel’s preparation is as simple as dunking well-shaped flour into
a tub of hot oil for 5 seconds, while preparing something like a steak takes
somewhere around… forever.
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| The pains of a 4-star restaurant |
Okay,
enough with the introduction let’s go into deep-fried analysis, get it get it
get it?
