Underneath my yellow skin

The art of the review, part five

Let’s talk reviews some more. In the last post, I touched upon how I have different standards when I review indie games, especially those that are made by devs with less than twenty-five people. I know I put a lower number on it yesterday, but I do think anything up to twenty-five is very small. Even more so when it’s less that five. The game I was discussing at the end of the post was Galaxy Burgers (Galaxy Workshop) which is made by two people. Two people! So of course I’m going to be way more generous with this game than with, say, Red Dead 2 (Rockstar Games)–or even Lies of P (Round8 Studio/NEOWIZ). That’s not to say that I won’t point out my issues with it, but it is to say that I will keep in mind that there are only two people making the game.

Just like the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series is only one guy–David Galindo (chubigans). This is really impressive given the scope of the games–especially for the first one. The food he designed looked absolutely mouth-watering, and I wanted to eat it as I was making the recipes. Each recipe included ingredients in which you had to tap a letter for each ingredient as quickly as you could. It’s hard as nails as evidenced in the trailer before. I only heard about it beacuse a content creator I was watching at the time, Northernlion, gave it a shot and quickly fell in love with it. So did Ryan Davis of Giant Bomb. In fact, the latter touted it so much, chubigans named a burger after him in the game–and Ryan Davis died roughly eight months after that.

The first Cook, Serve, Delicious! became a cult hit, and chubigans has always given credit to Ryan Davis. Chubigans went on to make two sequels and is now working on Cook, Serve, Forever! which is a more casual version of the formula. It’s still in Early Access, and while it’s not my thing, I’m still glad it exists. (I bought it and tried it out. I will keep trying it out. And I’m not mad at it.)

I love that I can play a game that is about cats and cafes/coffee shops/etc. There are a ton of games about cats and cafes these days, which pleases me. Even the ones that are the most basic don’t get me mad Like I said, I am not expecting AAA quality from a small indie game. I am incredibly generous/patient with small devs because I know that game development is hard, and I know that it’s even harder for small/indie devs.


Is that fair? I think so. Take a look at the trailer above. You’ll see that while the food looks scrumptious, the rest of the graphics are pretty basic. I think they look good, but there’s nothing flashy about the looks of the game. I will say that this is at the beginning of the game when you acquire a dump of a restaurant. As the game goes on, the restaurant looks better and better. The sequel is my favorite becaause you can decorate your restaurants. And because it cut out some of the extraneous shit that made the first game a bit tedious (like having to do 20 days to a certain standard to get a star).

The third game was ambitious in scale, but I thought it fell short in reality. I did not like the competition being included in the game itself and not as a separate arena. Northerlion being one of the announcers for the competition (his wife is the other). The big reason that I hated it was because, well, I have to give you the background first. In this game, the apocalypse happened and two robots save you. You scrape together a food truck and go around the country serving dishes on the road. As you go, you can upgrade your equipment and lessen the restrictions that you face. For example, a rival food truck may sabatoge your cookers so you can’t tell how long it’s been cooking.

The worst one, though, is the sabotage of the preprepared food. You can make certain dishes and keep them on heaters while you wait for someone to order them. They degrade in quality as time goes, and at a certain point, they spoil. If you fully upgrade your equipment, then you can make it so the decay rate is greatly reduced. It takes a lot to upgrade fully, and I took great pains to do it as soon as I could. Especially the decay rate one beacuse that was the worst by far.

When I got to the competition, it turned out that all the upgrades were disabled for the competition. And I lost complete interest in the game. I had forgotten how quickly the food decayed, and I wasnot willing to deal with it again. Also, it seemed like a slap in the face that all the upgrades I worked so hard to get were taken away from me. I had bought the game in Early Access at the beginning of the pandemic, and it was a great way to keep my mind off the world around me, but it was really disheartening for that to be the third act. I will say that when I went back many months later to check in on the game, chubigans had undone that–or at least mitigated it.

And still, I would give the game a 7.5 or 8. Even though I probably won’t go back to it, much to my chagrin. I have the plat for the first game (before he added a ton of content to it), but there were a few things in the same game that made it nearly impossible for me to plat it. Same with the third.

I don’t hold that against a game, obviously. How hard the plat is, I mean. Though I will say that I was pleasantly surprised with how comparatively easy the plat for Elden Ring was. If I had managed to make the cloud save work for me, I would have gotten it done in one playthrough. I didn’t mind doing three playthroughs, though, because I knew I would, anyway.

There is no way I can compare Elden Ring with Cook, Serve, Delicous! They are on completely different planes. It would not be fair to either game, really, and it would be comparing apples and oranges. I really think it would be better if reviews did not contain numbers even while I realize the utility of such a system. I will continue more on this tomorrow.

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