Cooking is probably one of the last leisure activities you can do for its own sake. Firstly, cooking is a necessity, since for most people it's something they have to do to eat. But cooking can also be a creative exercise, and beyond the ultimate disaster in the home, it always produces a satisfying result, one that improves your skills and knowledge for the next round.
Cooking is similar to gaming because once you've learned the basics, it becomes an arena for experimentation, learning new methods, ingredients, spices, etc. Perhaps that's why so many games use cooking systems in the first place, as a subsystem that gives texture and flavor (LOL) to the digital world, or to turn the act of cooking into a dexterous skill challenge.
Cooking in video games usually comes in two forms: one is where the player simply combines ingredients acquired while exploring the game world, which can grant certain bonuses to the actual gameplay portion, as in Breath of the Wild and the Monster Hunter series, and the other can be used for other gameplay purposes, such as gifting certain characters based on their preferences later on, as in Stardew Valley and its healthy crop of ilk.
The other form is more complex and appears in games where cooking is the main course (lol) and is abstracted into a series of micro-interactions of timing and skill. The best example of this is: Cooking Mama In this series, the preparation of each dish consists of a series of simple control movements, culminating in a generous grading.
Often this involves micromanaging multiple tasks at once, like in Friendship Test's Overcooked or OG Casual King's Dinner Dash, which require you to maintain a nervous zen mentality while spinning a lot of plates at once, which is why the DD method has spawned some very successful clones on the mobile market even today.
Other games are more focused on gamifying the finer details of cooking food. Cook it, serve it, and enjoy it The combination of strict time management and a wide variety of micro-interactions to learn can be quite challenging at high levels of play. Battle Chef Brigade It mixes different genres like action platforming and match-3 puzzles (lol) and abstracts the core Iron Chef anime experience, but each individual mechanic falls flat due to excessive elements. Complexity and Junk.
(Also, Cooking Simulator It's a hyper-detailed recreation of the professional chef's experience, but like most of PlayWay's published simulations, the game mechanics aren't abstract or “gamey,” and the design discussion doesn't feel particularly engaging. It's still pretty fun, and educational for anyone who can't tell a pot from a pan.
As an avid video game enthusiast, I understand the appeal of both approaches. Just combining ingredients to assemble a given recipe can be a pain, but once All available recipes The 2D sci-fi Minecraft game Starbound gained popularity because material gathering fit so well into the exploration game loop, even though there was no end goal to its system beyond mandatory stat buffs and relatively easy accomplishments.
In fact, many cooking games tend to become repetitive. The Cooking Mama series lacked challenge and concrete goals beyond the cooking itself, and felt like a waste of a fairly complex system, ultimately dooming the series to failure and tragically ending with Mama. Shady Bitcoin businessEven if you love CookServe Delicious, repeating the same microtasks over and over feels more like a light simulation of a heavy-duty hospitality job than a lovingly prepared home-cooked meal. Delivering food foreverdoes some interesting experimenting with its formula, even though it upsets a lot of fans of the series (LOL).
There are plenty of other examples that budding designers can follow, but here are some recent critically acclaimed Venba A moving story and Immigrant Diaspora The simple cooking mechanics enhance the theme: Cooking is Venba feels more like a puzzle than a challenge, and there's little of the time pressure of similar games, but the act of following or straying from a recipe highlights the cultural aspects of food in a way that few other games do.
On the other hand, the PS1 classic RPG “Suikoden II” is infamously Cooking Contest Side QuestThe game features a large cast of judges, each with their own unique tastes that had to be taken into consideration when choosing a recipe. While gameplay is as simple as choosing a recipe and mashing circles, this side quest A complex set of rules The surprisingly emotional storyline made it a fan favorite.
finally, Place your order! is a game for the Wii that has one of my favorite twists on the genre. It combines simple mom-esque movement with the Wii Remote and DD-style time management, but the funny thing is that eventually you'll have clients with special preferences, like overcooked, raw, or spicy food. Cooking like that isn't mandatory as it just adds a bonus, but is integrated in an interesting way with the cooking mechanics. For example, overcooked food must be removed just before it burns, which adds an interesting twist to the gameplay.
This last example highlights something I feel is missing in most cooking games: the creative element in preparing a dish. Cooking games rarely allow for the improvisation that can be so satisfying when preparing a dish in real life: swapping out ingredients, choosing the right spices to improve the flavor of a dish, or adding a pinch of salt to a dessert. In most of the examples we've considered, the path to the final dish is usually a straight line with two winning states: you either prepare the dish or you fail, with no nuance in between.
Some games are more exciting by setting different kinds of goals and satisfying the player's creativity in the same way as choosing the right build in an action game or RPG (lol). What dishes will satisfy the taste buds of vegans and meat lovers? Can you combine culinary elements from different cultures without losing their essence? Where are the games that simulate the experience of making an accidental masterpiece at 4am with leftovers and courage?
Cooking is a ubiquitous activity, so it's no wonder it appears in so many games – the field of cooking never ceases to interest us, considering how many people have featured it in games. Recipe video,Furthermore of many Recipe book While there are a few video game cooking specific games out there, it feels like unexplored territory in many ways. Successful games like Diner Dash and Overcooked have perfected influential yet very specific mechanical interpretations, but I feel like there's still a dearth of cooking video games. This game alone could launch a whole new genre and maybe even sway some people away from DoorDash by piqued their curiosity about real food. So, get in the kitchen, fellow gamers!
(Yeah, I've seen Dungeon Food And it makes me wonder why there aren't any games that properly combine dungeon crawlers with cooking. I mean, Atlus should just reskin Etrian Odyssey. That would take like a week. They'd be wasting their money.
