Game: Cuisineer
Genre: Action, Roguelike, Adventure, RPG, Simulation
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: BattleBrew Productions | Marvelous Europe, XSEED GAMES
Controller Support: Yes
Price: US $24.99 | UK £20.99 | EU € 24,99
Release Date: November 9th, 2023
Review code used, with many thanks to Decibel PR.
Developed by BattleBrew Productions, Cuisineer is a unique mix of genres. It’s an action game, a roguelike, and a cooking game all rolled into one.
Pom Returns Home
Cuisineer starts with the main character, Pom, the cat, an adventurer, returning home to Paell. She finds her parent’s restaurant is shut, and they have gone off on a trip worldwide. But there is a kick in the tale: Pom’s parents have left the restaurant with a huge debt which must be paid off.
While the storyline isn’t unusual, I found it disconcerting that Pom’s parents felt it was fine to go on holiday with the restaurant business in debt, so much for adult responsibility. There could be a better way to teach your child about responsibilities instead of Oh, we’re in debt; let’s go on holiday and forget about it!
Night and Day Cycle
Cuisineer has a night and day cycle, and the gameplay is split into two halves. Firstly, one half is an isometric procedurally generated dungeon crawler, where you explore dungeons and defeat monsters to gather ingredients. The other half is a restaurant manager, where you must use the ingredients you gathered to cook meals for the residents of the town of Paell.
So Pom goes dungeon diving armed with cooking utensils as weapons and wears gourmet gear. To begin with, Pom has a spatula and plates to take down enemies. However, as you progress, you can buy more powerful weapons from Briquette, such as a Smackerel, Swordfish and Tenderiser. I like that the weapons stick to the cooking theme, and using a spatula to take down enemies is fun.
Dungeon Crawling
You’ll find plenty of enemies to use your cooking utensils against in the dungeons. There are Bosses such as a giant chicken, a whole host of mobs like artillery shrimps, fire-breathing peppers, and many chickens that attack in swarms.
All the drops from the enemies are food-based. Chickens drop eggs and, of course, chicken meat, which are all used during cooking in the restaurant. As well as collecting food resources, you’ll also gather wood and stone. Later, the wood, stone, and some coins are used to expand your restaurant so you can serve many more customers.
Weapon Buffs
To spice up the fighting, Pom’s weapons have elements attached. However, unlike other games that follow the Earth, Fire, Wind and Ice elements, Cuisineer has food-based elements, like salty, sour, sweet and bitter.
The dungeons are challenging, and with the game having roguelike elements, if Pom dies in the dungeon, you lose the items you have gathered. But if you do find the dungeons too challenging, you can reduce the amount of damage Pom takes in the settings menu.
The procedurally generated dungeons change their size, shape, and resources whenever you visit. They are full of enemies and traps, spikes, and projectiles. There are plenty of decent challenges to overcome throughout the various dungeon biomes. After a while and lots of fighting, I found the dungeons quite repetitive in the end. I’d much rather be working in the restaurant cooking food than fighting hordes of enemies.
Lets Cook
As for cooking and the restaurant, you must cook to increase your reputation and make the restaurant successful. This side of the gameplay is great fun and has a nice loop to the cooking and serving customers. You have different types of customers who require different food, and they get annoyed if you don’t have the correct food or a table for them to sit at.
Additionally, the restaurant will get very busy three times during the day. Lunch, tea and dinner rush are the busiest times when the customers flock to the restaurant. Also, the restaurant starts small with only a pot to cook in, but you can buy more cooking equipment, such as a frying pan, oven and grill, to increase the range of food.
Upgrade the Restaurant
Similarly, the restaurant can be upgraded in size by visiting Alder, the carpenter. However, when I first upgraded the restaurant, I was disappointed as the size didn’t increase dramatically.
The day starts at 9 am, and you can open the restaurant any time you want up until 11 pm, then at midnight, it’s bedtime. No matter where you are in the game, you get sent to bed once the clock hits midnight. Days go in quickly, and there is always plenty to do. I think the days go in too quickly; I’d like more hours in the day as it’s difficult to get everything done. You gain new recipes by completing quests for the townsfolk.
That brings me to the recipes and the food you serve; most of the food is based on Singapore cuisine. So what you cook in the game are actual Singaporean cultural foods.
Beware though, Cuisineer should come with a health warning. I don’t recommend you play the game if you are hungry. When you are given a recipe, the item is shown on the screen in all its yummy glory; play for too long, and you’ll be drooling.
Visuals, Controls and a Few Niggles
Graphically, Cuisineer looks great, and the environments in the dungeons change as you progress through them. From the Green Ruins, Frozen Fjord, and Konpeito Swamps and more, they all look detailed.
It’s not all plain cooking in Cuisineer, as I do have a few niggles about the game. Sometimes, when I went to hand in a quest to an NPC I’d completed, the game didn’t register that I had completed the quest. I had to talk to the quest-giving NPC more than a few times before I was rewarded with a recipe.
Also, you can play Cuisineer with a keyboard and mouse or a controller. It’s not the kind of game I would suggest using the keyboard and mouse for, especially during fights in the dungeons, so I used a controller.
Sadly, when using the controller, it was pretty unpredictable when the game would register when I pressed the button. This was most noticeable during a cooking session in the restaurant; numerous times, I had to constantly press the RB button when an NPC wanted to pay for their food or when Pom was standing in front of the cooking appliances.
Furthermore, many character sprites are reused, so you will see the same sprites visit your restaurant repeatedly.
Another thing that bothered me while playing Cuisineer is that there are a lot of loading screens between areas. It typically goes like this: go to the bedroom, a load screen, and go outside the restaurant; there is a load screen. Having so many load screens breaking up the gameplay also broke my immersion in the gameplay.
Conclusion
When I started playing Cuisineer for this review, it took a while for the game to grow on me. I was going to score it lower, but after spending more time with the game, I have revised my score. Looking after the restaurant is fantastic, addictive, and enjoyable. The fighting in the dungeons is frantic, but I like that I can choose when to go dungeon crawling.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot 