Cuisineer Review

Cuisineer is a roguelite dungeon crawler developed by BattleBrew Productions and published by Marvelous Europe and XSEED Games. I never heard of this game before, but let me give you a taste of what I think after spending some time with the game: Go get it. I thoroughly recommend it, but I don't condone impulse buying so let me tell you what this game serves on a platter.

You play as a little cute cat girl named Pom, an adventurer who has been put in charge of her parents' restaurant while they're off travelling the world. Unfortunately, they sold off most of the furniture and equipment needed to actually run the place, and that's not to mention the massive amount of debt they accrued over the years, so it's up to you to get things back in order and serve the most delicious food from the ingredients you get from adventuring out in the world.

First off, let's talk about graphics. I really liked the style they went for here. Everyone's character portraits are super cute and their models are really detailed, from the customers that come in every day to the NPCs you interact with in town. Even the monsters you have to kill are really pleasant to look at. I would love plushies of some of the characters, Pom especially. You'd never guess this kitty could bash open boar skulls with an oversized tenderizer!

But enough about the looks, time for business. Running your restaurant is fairly easy. After designing the place to your standards with furniture and equipment, all you have to do after opening for the day is to cook the food and make sure everyone pays. You don't even have to serve most customers. They will automatically go up to the counter and take it when it's ready. However, noble customers will need to be served personally or else they'll leave without paying. All of those sounds easy enough, but certain hours of each day will have business ramp-up: Lunch, Tea, and Dinner. If you aren’t paying attention while dealing with about a dozen customers at once, you could very well end up losing customers and profits. Let me just say, wow, this could've been a game on its own. Constantly managing between cooking, serving, and keeping an eye out for any cheapskates can be chaotic but never overwhelming. That dash ability is a real godsend at times.

However, a restaurant is nothing without good quality food, and since getting suppliers isn't an option, you'll have to dive into various dungeons to get the ingredients you need, most often dropped by the monsters that lurk in there. They're randomly generated and the higher levels you travel, the harder the monsters and the more ingredients you find. You'll also need to mine stuff like wood and stone because there are a lot of things that need them for crafting. Luckily, you should be armed to the teeth with culinary weapons and boba tea to make those runs easier to survive.

In general, your equipment is how you actually get stronger and make those runs into dungeons that little bit easier. Anything you can equip from gloves, boots, and weapons can have random traits that grant additional abilities. Add fire to your dash, freeze your enemies with each hit, or add some HP to your health bar. You can improve your equipment and its traits at the blacksmith and add or replace them with new ones at the brewer, so you have at least some freedom with how to build your character. Now, I would've liked it if there was some sort of training dummy to test out weapons and abilities instead of needing to go out and potentially get myself killed, but it's not that big of a deal.

Meanwhile, boba tea acts as a consumable item that can heal and buff you with various effects, but you only have a maximum of four slots on your belt to store them in and for most of them you need to research, unlock, and upgrade to make them useful. The more you have, the better your chances and the longer you can survive in the dungeons, and that means a bigger haul to bring back to your restaurant… if you haven't done anything too dumb out there. 

If you manage to get yourself killed, you lose a bunch of items from your inventory as well as end the day there, so it's better to cut your losses and exit the dungeon with what you have. You can leave any time with the press of a button, but it takes a while for it to teleport you so you have to be safe before you can do it. And no matter what time you leave and how long you stay, it will always be 23:00 by the time you get back, which is barely enough time to put your spoils into your fridge before heading off to bed. And don't assume you can just open the restaurant then go out adventuring after you earned some cash without consequences, you'll have a max HP penalty depending on how long you spend in town that will last until your next rest. So don't overdo it and work yourself to death, you hear?

Now, I've been rambling for quite a bit now, so let’s get into what I didn’t like. For one, I did encounter some glitches at the time of review, from flickering textures to one or two freezes and crashes. It's not completely unstable, but a manual save would've been nice instead of saving at the end of each day. I also didn't like that I couldn't pin material lists onto my screen. It would make getting the food needed to get an upgrade or complete a sidequest that much easier to remember because there are a lot of things to buy and upgrade in this game that it becomes really hard to track by yourself. It was also a little frustrating that some NPCs only appeared on certain days, which made the times I had everything needed to complete their sidequest take longer than it should have. I've been hanging onto 10 pizzas for at least three days for you, dammit, at least show up when I have them fresh!

Other than my problems with tracking down the townsfolk to complete their quests, Cuisineer is really damn good. I found myself addicted to this game, constantly going on a loop of adventuring, cooking, and upgrading so I could do all that but better. It's really engaging, and while simple on the surface, can really pull you in for hours as you slowly but surely become unstoppable both out in the world and in the kitchen.

Cuisineer is available on PC via Steam. What are you waiting for? Start cooking!