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Game Review – Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Cook, Serve, Delicious! by Vertigo Gaming is an entry in the woefully underrepresented hardcore time management genre. Tasked with developing a five star, world-class restaurant from scratch, you’ll start by preparing simple orders like pretzels, hotdogs and soda, and eventually work your way up to steaks, complex soups and even a Bananas Foster flambe!

Still, you might scoff, is this just another generic restaurant simulation that takes its marching orders from overly casual mobile games and half-baked money grabs? Not by a long shot.

cook-serve-delicious

Part of the brilliance of Cook, Serve, Delicious! is that it lets you play as much or as little as you want. The game rewards success with increasing intensity through its “buzz” mechanic, making your restaurant more popular as you perfect more and more orders.

Within a game week you can go from four or five customers in a game hour to fifteen or more, depending on how quickly you can get the orders out. The subtle difficulty curve in Cooke, Serve, Delicious! is strangely exhilarating.

You also need to manage the consequences of listing certain foods on your menu. Having too many fattening options will cause fewer people to come to your restaurant. Serving breakfast foods may cause a bump in buzz in the morning, but business in the evenings will subsequently suffer.

Upbeat jazz and lounge music by Jonathan Geer will carry you along your journey. When you find yourself bouncing along to the music, fulfilling orders with keyboard shortcuts in sync with the piano, feeling wonderfully ebullient, you’ll know you’re hooked.

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a step above most in its bare bones and beguiling design, and it absolutely deserves the highest marks for a game of its kind. The subtlety of the otherwise uncomplicated metagame and the misleadingly simple gameplay make for a truly addictive and enjoyable experience.

Buy Cook, Serve, Delicious! on Steam »

Buy the soundtrack on Bandcamp »

What do you think?

2 Comments

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  1. Really? I have to say I haven’t treated Cook, Serve, Delicious as something significantly special, but simply another casual restaurant game. But if anything in this review is true, I understand that’s not the case. I’ll sure enter for the draw – and maybe even buy it if I don’t win!

  2. Cook Serve Delicious deserves great praise indeed. It is a superbly crafted and remarkably well-paced (and intense) management game. Its sharp design rewards skill in a pure and challenging fashion and does everything to encourage mastery. Its hectic action phase is mercifully counterbalanced by menu strategy and the humorous narrative of the email system. David Galindo and his team should be very proud of their creation.

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