Sunday, 17 November 2013

Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Introduction

            This week’s review will be of...
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. 
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!). 
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.
 
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?