Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Thanksgiving kind of got me off track. I bought Fallout 4 at the midnight release. Played a bunch, then my family came for Thanksgiving. I had to tear myself away from Fallout while they were here, but the allure of gaming in some fashion was still too great. So I looked to Steam. I wanted something I could sneakily play in 10 minute increments late at night and no one would be the wiser. The solution to that was "Cook, Serve, Delicious!" And I'm surprised to say, it was very addictive and a lot of fun.

You are a cook at a shithole restaurant. You learn the ropes making corndogs and soft pretzels. Orders come in by number, you press a number to start preparing that order, and the customer's order specifics are listed at the bottom. With the corndog, it starts simple. You press K for Ketchup and M for Mustard and Enter to serve it. Each order has a time limit, and customer's patience wears thin quick, so you gotta be quicker. Speed is a major factor but so is actually getting the order right. An accurate order gets you the possibility of a tip and annoying yummy noises, an inaccurate order will affect your restaurant's buzz for the next day and your cashflow from the bad order.

Each day you have to put together a menu, and the game takes place in day increments. You have to put in a full day (that speeds by like whoa) and there are two rush hours in each day, one for lunch and one for supper. During both of these times, orders come in fast and furious, and you're more likely to screw up, as you'll be juggling 8 orders at a time for most of rush hour. As you succeed in making money, you're able to buy more expensive foods, and they're more difficult to make as you upgrade them. You start with corndogs, but you progress to things like pizza which has three different kinds of sauces and ten different toppings, for example. Some things have to be cooked after you combine the ingredients, some have to be cooked before. Some things can be served immediately, some things take a while, and some have to be prepared for OCD assholes that refuse to eat a kabob that has two of the same vegetable touching. #divas It's all about managing the order of your orders in the optimum way and memorizing the key bindings for each dish. Any time I have to double check the ingredient list, it slows me way down, and if I have multiple items I'm no good at, it ends up getting rather hectic... Try putting fully upgraded soup, kabobs, wine, pizza, nachos, and enchiladas on your menu and wait for the screaming.

You'll start with your 1 Star restaurant, but as you meet the objectives (work 20 days, pass 5 inspections, etc.), you'll work up to a 2 Star, 3 Star, up to a 5 Star restaurant. Another element of upgrading your digs is participating in Iron Cook challenges and some secret society jungle cooking tribunal. Both these require you to make a selection of foods quickly and accurately at a ridiculous pace while epic-ish music plays to further rattle you. Each of these challenges can be retried over and over, and retry them you shall. Some of them are awful.

Everytime I play a game that you can essentially play forever, ie there's no ultimate win condition, I have to set my own parameters so I can move on. Getting to a 5 Star restaurant seemed like the way to go, but once I got there, it said I could upgrade once more. Drat. This required another 20 days of service and beating all "The Hungry Festivities" challenges. Here came the biggest time suck of the game, but it was kind of my fault. Along with getting my 5 Star restaurant, I wanted to upgrade all my food to maximum difficulty/profitability, so that's where all my money went. Problem was, these jungle cooking challenges required 8 golden tickets each to unlock. I had been getting them randomly throughout the game, but once I got to my 5 Star restaurant, I still needed to unlock 3 of them...requiring 24 tickets total. Only then did I realize that they could be bought for $2000 a piece, and here I was wasting money on upgrading nonsense food like a sucker for days.

At least then my goal became clear. Get the money, buy the tickets, beat the things. And I got pretty sick of playing in the amount of time that took. After that, I got a Platinum Star restaurant and unlocked a bunch of stuff that I had no interest in playing anymore. #done

Overall, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed playing this game. Some of the dishes are really difficult, especially when there are 7 other things cooking or needing to be cooked at the same time. I'd recommend picking it up the next time it's on sale on Steam. I felt like a "filthy casual" playing it while I had a perfectly good Fallout 4 waiting in my PS4, but once I started it, I wanted to finish it, so I could mark it off my list for good. It's a fun game, and apparently there's a second one coming out next year, so give it a go.

Now...let's go explore that post-apocalyptic wasteland I've been ignoring.