INTRO:
There are attempts to make facsimiles of real-life activities in video games, even though the latter is a medium of sights and sounds only (thus far).
One of these attempts is what passes as “cooking”. Thus, a real-life activity that involves tactile motions and a sense of smell for production and quality control would be somehow simplified to just button presses and flicks of the wrists or fingers.
Cynicism aside, there is still some appeal to be had from watching the models or sprites of food progress from ingredients to the full dish as the player wrangles with the control inputs. Cook – Serve – Delicious happen to offer this appeal.
PREMISE:
“Nowhere else to go but up”. Such a story set-up is quite popular, not unlike “rags to riches” backstories. This game’s “career mode” uses such a premise.
The player character is presumably the embodiment of the staff that has been hired to work at a re-opened restaurant. The restaurant is part of an apartment tower that had fallen on hard times; the restaurant has since been reopened after the tower has received new occupants.
(It should be mentioned that the game has been developed and released during a time after the economic slump of 2008.)
The player character is given full control of the restaurant’s operations and finances. The gameplay implementation of these is certainly a far cry from real business decisions concerning restaurants, but it is good enough for the narrative about building up its fortunes.
PROGRESS SAVE:
Any playthrough only ever has one save-file. The save-file is updated whenever the player is in the menu screens about the preparations for the next day. It will not be updated during the workday (more on this later), so quitting or crashing during the workday means that the player’s progress is lost.
Considering that many occurrences are one-time only, having only one save-file for each playthrough can seem restrictive. Of course, the unscrupulous player could just make back-ups of the save-file, though this is obviously tedious.
CONTROL SCHEMA:
The game was made for the computer platform first. This fact is apparent in the designs of the user interface. For example, there are spaces for squares with capitalized alphabetical letters, which are obviously prompts for keyboard buttons. To players that are computer-centric, the looks of the user interface would have been a pleasant sight. (In the years prior to the release of this game, most games have been developed with the controller in mind.)
The same squares are large enough to be clicked on, and conveniently convertible to touch screen controls. On the other hand, there can be a lot of squares on-screen. Indeed, the main gameplay conceit is how fast and how accurately the player can press the buttons while keeping track of other things in the gameplay.
EFFICIENCY OF CONTROL INPUTS:
On its own, pressing buttons according to visual and audio cues would have been a banal experience. However, there is the matter of how efficiently the player can do so, specifically how much of these that the player can do in a given amount of time and which of these that the player would pick to do.
Conveniently, the game would implement these gameplay factors through the use of chores and food orders.
LIST OF TASKS:
Cooking food and doing chores are what the player would be doing throughout most of the (in-game) days working in the restaurant. These tasks are represented as a list on the top left corner of the screen. The list becomes longer as the player progresses in the playthrough.
The player clicks on the entries in these lists to begin the performance of the tasks. For each type of task, there is a user interface with a layout that has been designed for it. The player would eventually become familiar with the layouts, thus becoming either more efficient at tapping/clicking on the buttons, or reaching out and pressing the keyboard buttons that are used in these tasks.
TASK COUNTDOWNS:
There is a countdown timer to each task. Failing to complete the task before its time is up usually leads to bad reputation for the restaurant. Different tasks have different times too. The juggling of tasks will need to consider these differences, if the player wants to be efficient.
After a few in-game days into a playthrough, the player gains access to the purchase of “equipment” that would delay the timers. For example, air conditioning increases the patience of customers while they wait for their orders to be handled. However, there is generally nothing that can delay the timers for chores.
BUZZ:
If the tasks come one by one, doing them would have been quite easy. However, they can come at a much faster rate. One of the factors that determine this rate is “buzz”. “Buzz” acts as both the attractive appeal of the restaurant, and the difficulty of handling the business that is coming the restaurant’s way.
Buzz can be changed, usually through the player’s success (or lack thereof) at handling things that would affect the restaurant’s reputation. Doing great things that improve the restaurant’s reputation would bring in more people, but also more work, possibly to the point of being a victim of one’s own success if the player bit off more than he/she could chew. Neglecting chores and messing up orders will reduce buzz instead, which does give the player some breathing room thanks to the slower customer arrivals.
Changes to buzz from the player’s performance is only applied on the next day. The other methods of changing buzz can be applied during the workday itself. Specific methods of changing buzz will be described further later wherever relevant.
UPKEEP AND SUPPLY COSTS WAIVED:
The managers of real restaurants have to worry about the costs of maintaining the venues and its equipment. They also have to worry about the costs of getting supplies of ingredients and other cooking consumables.
The player does not have to worry about those in this game. This may keep the complexity of the game low, but this game was never really targeted at people who favour resource management games in the first place.
FOOD ORDERS – OVERVIEW:
Every customer that gets into the restaurant would make a food order, typically one of the things from the restaurant’s limited menu. (There will be more on the menu later.)
Every type of food has more than one variable; more expensive and more appealing food have more variables. Examples of variables may be condiment types, toppings and cheese options, to name some. The customer may make an order for a type of food with variables that are different from those of the order that another customer made for the same type of food.
Incidentally, the combinations of these variables reflect real-life recipes, including, especially, the common ones like carbonara pasta. There may be far more potential combinations, if one is to approach this matter with mathematics in mind. Yet, of course, some combinations would have been too dreadful to be considered palatable, even in a video game.
FULFILLING ORDER VARIATIONS:
Fulfilling these variables is part of the act of cooking. One would think that this is as simple as pressing buttons, but the food orders come in text statements that do not always have the same sentence structuring. Therefore, reading comprehension on the player’s part is also a gameplay factor, as is logic.
For example, the boiled lobster can come with cups of sauces. An order of lobster may be along the lines of “one cup of butter and cocktail”, which can seem confusing because it may mean that the customer wants one cup only with the sauces mixed. However, gameplay-wise, the sauces always come in separate cups, so the order is actually calling for one cup of butter and one cup of cocktail sauce.
If the player fulfilled the options in a food order correctly, the order is considered to have matched the customer’s desires and is considered perfect. Any mismatch causes dissatisfaction, with the amount of dissatisfaction proportional to the number of mismatches. In the case of some food types, any mismatch outright results in a bad outcome.
Bad orders cause consternation, which in turn leads to reduction in buzz. If the player really messes up a lot, there would not only be bad buzz, but also angry emails by jilted customers that can make things worse.
MUST DO CURRENT ORDER:
When the player initiates an order, the player must make the control inputs for this order until it is either ready to be served or it is ready to go into its cooking phase. There is no way to stop and resume the order later.
NO WAY TO DISCARD SCREWED-UP ORDERS:
If the player realizes that he/she has messed up an order, there is no way to discard the order and start over. This is perhaps the least believable part of the gameplay, even for a cooking video game.
FOOD TYPES – OVERVIEW:
Perhaps for reasons concerning intellectual property, the restaurant cannot just cook anything that it can cook. To cook any type of food, the player needs to purchase food types from a food database. The purchase costs can be considerable, so the player might want to weigh any purchase carefully against the player’s current needs, especially in the first few in-game days of the playthrough.
The player can see the flavour text and gameplay-affecting details of any food type in the same screen that is used to make food type purchases. However, the player cannot see this information anywhere else, at least not in detail. To do so, the player must go to the food type purchase screen.
“ACTIVE MENU”:
Apparently, the restaurant would be one of those with revolving menus, i.e. not all food types would be in the menu every day. Rather, the menu has a limited number of slots. The limitation also happens to be a balancing design for the different properties of the food types, which will be described later.
That said, the number of slots in the menu starts at four, but increases as the restaurant gains stars. Generally, it is in the player’s interest to only include foods that would be useful for the coming day, and not any more, i.e. the number of entries should be minimal. This is due to the different control inputs for the cooking of different foods, which can strain players who are not so able at keeping track of many things.
On the other hand, having as many entries as possible for their synergistic bonuses might be in the player’s favour, if the player can handle the complexity of the control inputs that the player would have to use. Speaking of which, the player might want to keep food types with inputs that the player is comfortable with, though the player also needs to keep track of “menu rot”, which will be described shortly.
Whatever the player’s choices though, the player must have a minimum of three entries in the active menu. Otherwise, the player cannot start the next working day.
MENU ROT:
Due to the use of the revolving menu, customers expect that entries in the menu would be changed. Any food type that is not considered a “staple” would eventually lose the interest of customers after it has stayed in the menu for two days straight.
Keeping the “stale” food type in the menu will inflict a penalty on the restaurant’s buzz. This may be what the player wants, if the player considers that the buzz level has risen to an unmanageable level.
Food types eventually lose their lack of popularity, generally after a day of being kept on the shelf.
FOOD TYPE PROPERTIES:
Some food types have properties that give the player advantages and disadvantages. For example, beer is a staple, and is quite popular in several circumstances. However, beer imparts a guaranteed buzz penalty that is not exactly well-explained. (Presumably, this is a reference to vague studies on the correlation between alcohol consumption and problems that people who live in high-rise buildings have.)
Anyway, it is in the player’s interest to keep these properties in mind, either for convenience during gameplay or for maximized revenue. For example, food types that are generally perceived as “snacks” will never be ordered during the lunch and dinner rush hours, which can simplify the gameplay during these hours if the player has a narrow but tidy menu.
Some food types have synergies with each other. For example, salads synergize with fish and chicken breast, all of which are considered “healthy food” (despite their topping and seasoning options); having them together in the menu introduces a buzz bonus. Likewise, some compound on each other’s perceived problems, such as the fatty foods.
It is in the player’s interest to mix and match food types for these properties, while also keeping menu rot in mind.
MULTI-TASKING:
Generally, when the player is performing a task, there is not much that the player can do about the others.
However, there are some other tasks that can be triggered while the player is making the control inputs for a task. For example, any dish that requires heating first can be put to the fire with a tap, thanks to the tasks being brought up using number buttons, which are not used for anything else. For another example, any dish that has been fully cooked and ready to be served can be served with those number buttons too.
TIMES OF THE DAY:
The workday of the restaurant is from 9.00 am to 10.00 pm, with not a single break period. (Again, the player is presumably the entirety of the staff at the restaurant.) In-game passes at one minute for about three quarters of a real second.
These in-game 13 hours is further separated into several segments. The first 3 hours count as the “morning” phase, in which any food properties that are associated with mornings would take effect. (That said, these morning properties often involve the smells of the ingredients for certain food types – fish, in particular.)
The 12.00 am to 1.00 pm hour is one of two rush hours. Presumably, this is the lunch break period for other people. Rush hours will be described later. This rush hour also counts as being in the afternoon. The 1.00 pm to 3.00 pm hours also count as afternoons.
The 3.00 pm to 6.00 pm hours count as evenings. This is the calm before the storm of the second rush hour, which occurs at 6.00 pm to 7.00 pm. After 6.00 pm, it is night time.
If the player has been pressed hard by the recent rush hour, 7.00 pm onwards is the time to wind-down – or to screw up any combo that the player may have accumulated. (There will be more on combos later.)
CHORES – OVERVIEW:
As the restaurant receives customers, they would use the premise’s amenities. As the restaurant serves them, the dishes that need cleaning would accumulate. Food refuse also builds up as garbage. These are used as the reason for the appearance of chores on the player’s to-do list.
Generally, having more customers means having to do more chores. The player is not shown the mathematical equations that are used to determine how many incoming chores there would be, of course.
In fact, after some observation, it would appear that the chores are generated randomly according to some unseen percentage. Evidently, the chores may not always match the food that the customers have ordered and consumed. For example, there may be food that do not use plates, but the player would get chores about cleaning plates anyway.
Unlike the food orders, chores do not have minor permutations or timing requirements. Most chores can be performed with control inputs entered as rapidly as possible. Indeed, it is in the player’s interest to get through them quickly, if only so that the player has time to perform other tasks, namely fulfilling food orders.
Failure to perform these chores does come with consequences, in case the player decides to ignore them. The restaurant will take a hit to its buzz rating for every failed chore, more so than failing to fulfil orders on time. The countdown timers on chores cannot be extended in any way either.
INSPECTION:
Every once in a while, a health inspector would appear in the restaurant. Her presence would accelerate the countdown for any chore. Worse, if the player fails a cumulative total of two chores while she is around, she issues a bad review of the safety and health conditions of the restaurant; more failures lead to a worse review. The consequences, of course, include a penalty to buzz, but there could be other setbacks too, such as fines.
IDENTIFICATION OF CULPRITS:
In some scenarios, a masked felon would barge through one side of the restaurant and out the other, having robbed the restaurant and taking away some money. Immediately after, a chore pops up; this chore is the identification of the culprit.
Some person would tell the player character about how the culprit looked like (despite the mask), and it is somehow the player character’s job to draw a mug sketch of the culprit. Since the control scheme does not include a drawing tablet, the player has to select options that would lead to the generation of a sketch.
These options represent the facial features of the culprit. There is a considerable number of these features, which can take a while to conclude.
This alone would not have been too much of a problem on its own. However, there is another problem: the player can only through the options for one feature in one direction. There does not seem to be any way to cycle in reverse. (Incidentally, this issue is present in the selection of wines and menu toggles too.)
Of course, the cunning player could just make a screenshot of the descriptive details, pause to check each detail and then resume in order to make the appropriate input. This will not work around the issue of the limited cycle direction, however.
That said, the player must perform this task; failure to do so not only forfeits the money that has been stolen, but gives the restaurant bad buzz. There is no reward for doing so, so robberies are nothing more than unpleasant inconveniences. Unfortunately, robberies become more frequent as the restaurant becomes glitzier.
Interestingly though, the developers may have noticed this complaint, and greatly reduced the occurrence of robberies on the regular difficulty.
COMBOS:
Perfectly fulfilling consecutive orders builds up a combo. Generally, this is there for the player to track; the combos do not appear to affect anything gameplay-related during the workday. After the workday is complete, the player’s combo is considered in the fulfilment of bets and checklist entries, which will be described later.
Chores do not contribute to combos. However, failing them does break combos, so the player will not want to ignore them.
PERFECT DAYS:
If the player can maintain a complete perfect combo throughout the entire workday, the player scores a “perfect day”. One of the Iron Cooks (a rather rich one too) would (somehow) take notice of this and sends some money the player’s way. In the early days of the restaurant, the gift money is considerable, and can go a long way towards offsetting any low-buzz workdays that the player has set up.
Of course, getting perfect days is easier said than done, at least for people who are not already expertly familiar with their favoured control scheme and food types. Minimizing the number of entries in the active menu helps a lot too, if only to reduce the complexity of the control inputs that the player would have to make.
FOOD UPGRADES:
After the workday, the player is given the earnings from the restaurant. The player can spend these on additional food type licenses, equipment or food upgrades.
Food upgrades increase the selling price of the food type; the customers are somehow okay with this. Gameplay-wise, this is the only advantage that the player gets from the “upgrades”; the other changes, if any, may make things more complicated for the player.
Some food types cannot be upgraded at all. Some others can only be upgraded just once. Some foods, such as fish, can be upgraded several times. Usually, upgrades become available as the restaurant rises in star ranks.
Certain upgrades do indeed do nothing more than a positive improvement, such as the first few upgrades for fish. Some others introduce more variables to the order permutations, which can be troublesome if the player has not noticed the statement that there would be more “recipe cards”.
EQUIPMENT:
Some of the equipment that the player would buy are needed for certain food types. That said, the equipment does nothing more than render food types available for inclusion in the menu.
Other equipment is there to make things a bit easier for the player. For example, there is equipment that reduces the probability of chores occurring.
Not all equipment is available to the player from the get-go. The number of days that have passed is the main factor in determining when they become available. Equipment is often expensive, so the player will want to be careful with his/her spending decisions.
The late-game equipment is not available through the usual channel. To get this, the player needs to fork out money for in-game crowdfunding projects, which will be described later.
EMAILS:
The story mode – called “Career Kitchen” in-game – has the player character receiving emails from various parties, which include the management of the apartment tower and the Iron Cooks (who are loosely based on the Iron Chefs of real-life). There are also emails from spam-bots.
It is in the player’s interest to look through these emails, if only to know which ones are pertinent to the restaurant and for silly flavour text. This is also how the player would find opportunities to make a bit more moolah for the restaurant. Indeed, some of these emails might even have attachments that grant money to the player.
The email software will not keep all read emails, however; old ones will be automatically deleted. The player can tag some emails as favourites, if the player wants to keep any for posterity.
TEXT PRAISES:
This game was made close to the time when taking images of food has been trending. This fad is implemented in-game as optional bonuses of sorts. If the player has been doing well, the player would receive text messages from satisfied customers, who ask the player character to make a remark before they send their praise out to friends. Doing so gives a temporary buzz bonus that is applied during work hours.
Doing these is optional, and they are quite fast to pull off. On the other hand, the player might be inundated with urgent tasks at the time, so ignoring them might be wise.
BETS:
After a few in-game days, the player character would receive emails from two parties: Crazy Dave and CookBets. This game’s “Crazy Dave” is not the babbling zany salesperson from Plants Vs Zombies, but rather the online handle of a person with possibly serious gambling issues. CookBets is an automated gambling software.
Anyway, Crazy Dave tends to be the first to approach the player. Crazy Dave would suggest that the player could not do something, such as achieving a combo with specific foods in the menu, or not fail a customer’s order badly. The permutations of his bets tend to be more complicated than those set by CookBets. Crazy Dave offers a set amount of money if the player wins, but does require the player to fork out money upfront.
CookBets is a software that was made to challenge budding restaurants and their chefs. Somehow, CookBet will assert itself into the player character’s email software, thus enabling a button that lets the player check CookBet’s bet permutation for the day. That said, CookBets generates a bet for each day; the bet usually requires the player to achieve a specific combo level while having specific food types in the active menu.
The main caveat here is that CookBet only accepts “silver tickets” as collateral. The player may get silver tickets as rewards within emails from impressed parties. Silver tickets only become available for direct purchases many in-game days later.
Anyway, CookBet’s bets have variable pay-outs, depending on the multipliers that are associated with any of the required food types in the bet. Generally, having more food types and more complicated foods provide higher pay-out multipliers. That said, if the player has to purchase tickets, the player will want to consider the potential pay-out, which can be lower than the price of a ticket.
CHECKLIST:
The player’s restaurant starts at zero quality stars; its venue even shows this. However, the player is also shown a checklist of things that can be done to earn more quality stars for the restaurant. There is a considerable number of entries in the checklist. Most of them are quite doable, especially for a skilled and/or cunning player.
One of them can be tedious, however. This is the number of in-game days that the restaurant is open for service. The player may have achieved the other criteria much earlier, and the only thing left is to trudge through the days before the restaurant can earn its next star. This is likely to be the game design that would test the player’s patience with the game.
CATERING:
Catering is a service that the player can perform at any particular day – time does not even pass. Again, this reinforces the impression that the player character is the entire staff of the restaurant.
Anyway, the player goes to some party elsewhere, such as the workplace of a company that is holding a party for its employees. The party’s organizers generally only want two types of food, and the player is expected to fulfil orders for them within just two in-game hours. There is a narrow tolerance for failure (often just three bad orders), and the player can only attempt any catering job just once.
The challenge of the catering jobs can vary considerably. Some may be as easy as merely serving fried chicken and other simple foods, or the player may get tough ones, like cooking up pizzas and burgers. (It is astounding how much that the customers can go through in just two hours, in the case of food that should be rather filling.)
The player is rewarded for his/her trouble with rather high returns for each serving – far higher than the usual price, in fact. The player can get paid $25 for each corn dog sold, for example.
DATING:
Amusingly, there is also an attempt to implement a dating mini-game in Cook-Serve-Delicious. After the player has attained two stars, the player receives an email from a dating service for cooks (of all services to provide).
If the player responds to the email, the player would eventually be notified about the other person’s eating preferences. Obviously, if the player wants this endeavour to be successful, the player needs to have this person’s favourite food in the menu; otherwise, this person would not even go into the restaurant and the date would fail.
The person’s appearance at the restaurant is obvious. The player is already shown his/her appearance in an email prior to the beginning of the workday. In case this is not enough, there are cartoon hearts floating out of this person’s sprite. He/She will place an order for his/her favourite food, and it is in the interest of the player not to screw this up.
Afterwards, this person presumably leaves or go somewhere, but that is not the end.
TEXT MESSAGES FROM DATE:
Close to the end of workday, the player receives text calls from the person, regardless of whether he/she came or not. If the person did not come or the player messed up the date’s order, the player does not need to bother; the date will fail.
If the person did come and was served perfectly, the player then has to select the “correct” responses from a list of options, usually the ones that sound the most romantically cheesy; the other responses are just nonsensically awful. The player also has to wait for the date’s text lines to appear, and wait for the player’s own options to appear, for whatever reason.
The problem here is that this text conversation appears as a task that competes with other tasks for the player’s attention. Failure to do this text conversation counts as failing the date.
BUG WITH DATING:
The date might not turn out right, mainly due to the player’s inability to juggle responses to the date and the work that should be done. The player might try to quit the day, and restart it.
Unfortunately, there is a bug that causes the game to forget that the player has already included the date’s favourite food in the menu; learning this can be unpleasant. To work around this, the player may have to remove the food from the menu, check the email notification about the date’s preferences, and then place the food back into the menu. This re-triggers the script that acknowledges that the player has included the food into the menu.
COMMITMENT OF DIFFERENT SORTS:
Consecutive successful dates eventually end with the other persons announcing their other obligations, declaring that they have been inspired to do something elsewhere or some other reasons that have them going elsewhere. Curiously though, they always give “mysterious golden tickets” as parting gifts. There will be more on these tickets later.
IRON COOK CHALLENGES:
When the restaurant has gained three stars, the Iron Cooks invite the player character to join their cooking shows. These are endurance runs; the player is tossed a barrage of short-patience orders, all of which are independent of whatever food types or food upgrades that the player has obtained.
The player needs to have considerable familiarity and great reflexes to win them honestly. Other players will have to cheat.
The player’s reward is a large amount of money (usually one good day’s earnings) and some “mysterious golden tickets” (which will be described later).
FURTHER RESTAURANT UPGRADES:
Some further upgrades are not available through the usual catalogue of stuff from Mechanical Unlimited (which is the restaurant’s main supplier of equipment). Rather, they are obtained through crowdfunding pleas by people who approached the player character through email. Incidentally, their funding target is exactly the amount stated in the more expensive response that the player can give. The more expensive response guarantees deliveries.
These upgrades are not shown in the player’s list of equipment. Rather, they are showed in the visuals of the restaurant and any device that is used in the tasks. For example, the project for a special scrubber would yield a green puffy sponge that is particularly effective at wiping dishes when they are washed.
HUNGRY FESTIVITIES:
During the time between when the restaurant was at zero stars and when it was at four stars, the player may have been accumulating golden tickets that do not seem to be used for anything. There is also a mysterious party that frequently sends reminders about something mysterious whenever the player ticks off boxes on the checklists. (The reminders also come with golden tickets.)
When the restaurant has earned four stars, the officials of the Hungry Festivities reveal themselves. For whatever reason, they are eager to test skilled chefs.
However, to partake in the tests, the player must fork out golden tickets to unlock them. Each one costs eight golden tickets. The player can purchase golden tickets, but they tend to be expensive, so the player would be better off finding and hoarding the tickets.
Each of these tests involves a food type that happens to have many recipes. For example, the first one is pasta, which has around 25 recipes. The test requires the player to cook one dish of each recipe – correctly. The orders come by slowly and the patience countdowns are generous, but the complexity of the recipes would eventually eat into the player’s time as he/she figures out which control inputs to use.
Completing the Hungry Festivities will be needed to achieve the final rung of accomplishments.
VIP VISITS:
At its highest stars, the restaurant begins to attract famous clientele. There are some foods that have properties that will particularly attract them, though these foods tend to be among the most complicated to make.
These VIPs, when served perfect orders, will give the restaurant a certain boost to buzz for the next day.
LOCAL-ONLY MULTIPLAYER:
Multiplayer appears to be local-only. The computer version has one player using the keyboard and mouse while the other uses a controller. This is par for the course for many indie games on the computer platform.
The competitive game modes require the players to take alternating turns, because apparently the user interface is not able to accommodate two dishes and the lists of control inputs. Timers are used to limit any player’s time with the cooking.
There are player characters that can be unlocked for use, but the differences between them appear to be mainly aesthetic. Some of them are references to something, so there may be some appeal to be had from obtaining them for use.
The co-op modes are not exactly sophisticated either, due to the same limitation. One player takes over the initiating, resuming and serving of orders, i.e. making the control inputs for the list of tasks. The other player makes the control inputs for placing ingredients.
This means that co-op experience is mainly a matter of coordination. It might not make cooking any easier; the opposite might even be the case.
WEEKLY CHALLENGES:
When the game was actively tracked by its developers way back in the early 2010s, there were the weekly challenges that the player can participate in. Each challenge poses a sequence of dishes, which are the same from attempt to attempt.
The weekly challenges score any player based on the time that he/she took to complete those dishes. Mistakes inflict penalties on the player’s time score.
At this time of writing, the weekly challenges have long halted, since the developers have moved on to the sequels of this game. The GOG version of the game does not appear to be able to connect to the server that hosts the record times either.
ART GALLERY:
The last content in the game to be revealed is the “art gallery”. In actuality, this includes screenshots that the developers have made of the assets for previous builds of the game. In particular, the gallery would show that the game was developed from an earlier, similar game that the developers have made. The developers also have terrible programmer art.
VISUAL AND AUDIO CUES:
Visual and sound indicators are how the player relies on knowing when to make control inputs. For example, in the case of deep fried foods, the player must stop frying when he/she sees smoke begin to billow from the fryer. For another example, bells sound whenever food that needs cooking has been cooked.
In other cases though, the visual and aural changes are not important. One example is that for the Soda Fountain. The first impression that the player might have about this is that the player has to wait for the cup to be adequately filled, considering the sounds of liquids being poured into the cup. However, waiting for this is not necessary; the player can serve the soda as soon as the buttons to pour liquid and/or include ice have been pressed.
Having described the contribution of the visuals and sounds of the game to its gameplay, this article would move on to their aesthetics.
VISUAL DESIGNS - OVERVIEW:
Cook – Serve – Delicious has been made for multiple platforms, including mobile devices during the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The artists for the game are also not greatly skilled at animation. Thus, most of the graphics in the game appear to be static sprites and 2D artwork. Still, there has been noticeable effort that has been invested into them.
CUSTOMERS’ APPEARANCES:
The people are represented with static sprites of cartoon people. However, there are considerable variations in their superficial appearances. The playthrough begins with people who are seemingly in their later years, e.g. slightly past or well past their prime; this may or may not be an implied commentary, as they appear to be the main patrons of the initially zero-star restaurant. Most of them also seem a bit shabby.
As the restaurant gains more stars, the clientele begins to include better dressed and often younger-looking people. The shabby patrons begin to disappear too.
However, all customers are always standing and looking towards the right, for whatever reason. Their facial expressions also never change.
They always enter the screen from the left, bob up and down across the screen towards the right and their legs and hips are never shown. They are never shown eating or even holding food either. Furthermore, the people that are shown in this game have rather similar facial structures – the women, in particular. All these give the impression that the artists have cut down on production time by using template sprites.
Of course, the player might not notice the simplicity of the character sprites, because he/she is likely to be busy looking at the buttons for the control inputs and the text description of the customers’ orders.
COOKING VISUALS:
Ingredients, condiments and sauces appear on the dish as the player applies them; the player will never see any human hands moving about, much less working the ingredients. The ingredients also swap their sprites abruptly as they are worked.
There are some particle effects, mainly for the cooking methods that involve heating. The player might see steam and smoke billowing out of the cooking stations. The player may also see crumbs or droplets being hurled from the dishes as the finishing touches are applied.
Consequently, the cooking does not exactly look convincing, much less elegant. Nonetheless, they are still amusingly whimsical, and more importantly, they are sufficient to be functional enough for the gameplay.
SOUND DESIGNS:
Most of the appeal from the game’s aesthetics are in its sounds.
The first thing that the player hears are the music. There is the “Cook, Serve, Delicious” song that would be remixed in the sequels, for example. There are other tracks, one for each time of the day, and a few for the rush hours; the catering parties also have tracks.
The player can resort to pausing the game to give himself/herself time to think, place fingers over specific buttons on the keyboard or the regions of the touchscreen where virtual buttons would be. However, this stops the current soundtrack; continuing the gameplay causes the soundtrack to restart, which can be annoying. (It also makes videos difficult to edit, if someone is thinking about cheating and then making a video of a “perfect” play afterwards.)
The people in this game talk in complete gibberish, even though they are clearly using English as their written language. Indeed, it may sound like the people who worked on the game are the ones making the illegible voice-overs. They might have seemed charming at the time during the release of this game, but there had been plenty of indie games that use illegible voice-overs since.
The sounds of cooking are much more noticeable than the visuals of cooking. In particular, the game is fond of slapping noises, which accompany the placement of ingredients onto dishes. Indeed, slapping noises are used wherever possible, if there are no other convincing noises like the rustling of powder as powder-based ingredients are applied. This can sound silly at times, but it is entertaining and does serve the purpose of indicating to the player that stuff has been added to a dish.
SUMMARY:
It should be obvious that even before playing this game, or any game with cooking for that matter, that no video game could ever provide any facsimile of cooking. The most that they could do is make things whimsical, something that games like Cooking Mama has done. Cook, Serve, Delicious is yet another.
Granted, much of its gimmick is about making control inputs in complicated ways, with no means of starting over. This is something that becomes increasingly more daunting as the restaurant gains stars. Speaking of which, the need to pass many in-game days can test the patience of players who want to know what else is ahead.
Nonetheless, the game does have some charm. Although there had been plenty of indie games with graphics that are little more than sliding sprites and other 2D art assets, this one does them with gusto. Watching a dish take shape can be entertaining, at least before the appeal starts to get stale.