A few days ago, I was talking about the games I like and how they reflected the yin and the yang of my being. There’s a new game that has me thinking about where the two categories (hard games and cozy games) intersect. In the last post, I did not mention a series of games that are very near and dear to my heart. It’s the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series by David Galindo, the face behind Vertigo Gaming, Inc. The first one came out in 2012, and it was championed by Ryan Davis of Giant Bomb and Northernlion. Galindo (chubigans on Twitter and what I call him in my head). After Ryan Davis died, chubigans named one of the burgers after him. Chubigans has been quite vocal about his success being in large part because Ryan Davis and Northerlion pushed his game hard.
I was skeptical. A restaurant sim that is nails hard? How would that even work? I play cozy games to relax and I play hard games to stress myself out. Why the fuck would I want to do both at the same time? Is it even possible?
In a word, yes. I started the first game and got quickly addicted. It had romance, funny emails, and making delicious foods. What more could I want? I 100%ed the game (before all the arena stuff was added) and enjoyed it thoroughly. You could play as characters from other indie games for the arena fights, which was a hoot. I played it compulsively, and the tapping out the letters of the ingredients as fast as I could was oddly relaxing.
The second, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! was released in 2017, and I snapped it up immediately. They made several improvements such as streamlining the chores, getting rid of 20 days per star (it was a LOT), and being able to decorate your restaurant. I spent many hours in the restaurant creator and really enjoyed that aspect. I got decorations/equipment as rewards for completing levels and getting stars. The food continued to look incredible and the main gameplay of typing ingredients and getting out the dishes remained satisfying.
On the other hand, I was sad he got rid of the dating, but I understand why. It was very shallow in the first game, and it would have probably been too difficult to expand it properly in the second game. I also didn’t like that there was no big deal when you reached 5 stars. I was expecting there would be, but it simply expanded to 10 stars. That was deflating. Plus, there is no real ending to this game–not that I can remember. There was one to the first game, although it wasn’t anything to write home to, either.
I recently went back to the second game after getting out of the hospital to see if I could platinum it. I cleaned up a few achievements, cheesing some of them. But there are a few I simply cannot get–the same ones that made me quit in the first place. The problem is that to get a gold on each day, you can’t make a mistake. There are some days when I just cannot get a gold. It’s not physically possible. I’ve given up, albeit with regret. I wish a silver (uh….4 or less bad or average orders/failed chores) was enough for the plat, but I realize that it doesn’t really matter to anyone but me.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! was released on Steam in Early Access in January 2020. I just Googled it, and I remember that I was obsessed with it in the beginning of the pandemic. It got me through the first month or so, and I really enjoyed it for the most part. As always, the foods looked delicious. The premise of this one was that we were in post-apocalypse America (ouch) and driving a food truck across the country. There are two robots helping me out (Whisk and Cleaver) and other food trucks trying to destroy me.
Northernlion and his wife are in this game as the announcers at the Iron Chef-like competition at the end of the game. It’s hilarious especially as Northernlion is on the take. But, alas, that was my least-favorite part of the game. Throughout the game, I was able to buy abilities to neutralize the food truck attacks. By the time I reached the competition, I had them all maxed out. Then, for the competition, they were all disabled, which was a kick in the guts.
I finished the game, but I was not able to plat it. And I was pissed about the disabling of the abilities I had acquired through the game. Like, why even let me have them up to that point if you were going to take them from me in the most important competition? And if the joke is that everybody cheats, why not let me keep them? Plus, one of the food truck attacks was amped up for the competition. Or I just had forgotten how awful this particular attack was because it’s the one I maxed out first. It’s the ability to make your waiting food decay. And, apparently, it goes on forever without the neutralizers. I think I actually quit the game during the competition because that was just too much. I know chubigans adjusted it after many complaints (the game came out officially in October of 2020), but I did not find the competition part fun at all. There were days where you had to do eight stops without a mistake to get the gold. That’s a lot of stops and my brain would get tired by the fifth or sixth stop. It wasn’t fun, which is the point to playing games.
The latest (and presumably last) game in the series is called Cook, Serve, Forever. It’s supposed to release in early 2023. I am excited for it and can’t wait to get stuck in again with more delicious food. I’ll just try to not care about platting it.
The reason I brought it up is because there is a game that just released called Potionomics by Voracious Games, that has been reviewed as having a steep learning curve in the first third of the game. There is a beloved uncle who leaves me a potion shop. I have to gather ingredients, make potions, and sell them to pay off the mountain of debts he owed. Oh, and I’m a witch. There is competition (and deck-building!), romance options, and more. It’s only $25 on Steam, which is not going to break the bank. And it’s an independent team in Seattle, which I support. I will note that I don’t love the graphics, which everyone else has gushed about, but they are not bad, either.
It’s supposed to be really hard in the beginning before you have enough money to buy everything you need. There isn’t much of a tutorial, and you’re thrown in the first competition well before you’re ready. There is a fail-game state if you lose the competitions and you have to go back to the previous auto-save, which more than one reviewer mentioned. There is no casual mode and you can’t endlessly play after the game is ‘won’, which seems a misstep.
At any rate, it sounds like a hard cozy game, much like Cook, Serve, Delicious. We’ll see if I like it just as much.