Review | Cuisineer - Needs More Seasoning
Cuisineer is an interesting dish: its pleasing appearance nearly makes you salivate as your plate is delivered to you, but as you actually start to eat the well-crafted meal that was clearly made with love, your mouth gets a bit tired of its bland flavours. On first taste, the game puts you into the shoes of the scrappy and selfless adventurer Pom. After receiving a letter from her parents in which they gaslight her into thinking they’re on death’s door, she travels back home. With her worst fears put to bed, she then realises her childhood home and the restaurant attached to it have been left dormant, much to her and the townsfolk’s dismay. Partly because she’s unable to say “no” and partly because she’s a very helpful person, Pom finds herself obliged to repay her parents’ many, many debts, as she explores four biomes and confronts belligerent living ingredients all in the name of restoring the family restaurant, Potato Palace.
In order to restore Potato Palace to its former glory, Pom must craft tasty dishes to serve to the townsfolk of Paell. To do that, she needs ingredients. In Cuisineer, you won’t be tending a farm or going to market to fulfill that need. Instead, Pom will continue being a part-time adventurer by exploring places like the lush Green Ruins and the inhospitable Frozen Fjord, fighting her way through six floors of hazards and creatures in each dungeon. Always prepared to make a meal, adventurers use the same tools they cook with to slash, batter, and pelt their enemies in simple real-time combat. As a chef, she’ll be collecting what she can from these delectable creatures as well as gathering resources like wood and stone to improve the restaurant. While the ornery wildlife is dangerous you’ll also encounter active volcanoes, poisonous grounds, giant venus fly traps, and rogue giant snowballs to name a few obstacles Pom must avoid. There are also combat rooms to conquer, shrines to pray at, and fountains to recover health at, in case you’ve run out of tasty Boba. Unfortunately, there is no item drop off or shortcut as you traverse these dungeons. This means Pom is committed to finish a dungeon she enters, unless she teleports out or is knocked out.
The restaurant part of the game is fairly simplistic, as you open your eatery to hungry customers. You’ll especially want to do this on holidays, as normally, you’ll mainly only get customers during the lunch and dinner rushes. As they sit down and think about what they want, an order will appear above their head. You have plenty of time to cook it, and customers will even pick up their dish unless they are nobles who must be served by you personally. You’ll have plenty of time before a customer gets mad at the wait time, although they will eventually leave if you get overwhelmed or make a mistake. The only real danger in this segment of the game is if you’re not paying attention, some customers may attempt to dine and dash, but you are almost never penalised otherwise.
Each of the four biomes consists of six levels, with the third containing a mini-boss — the Green Ruins features the regrettably named Big Black Chicken — and an end boss at the bottom of the sixth floor, like the Konpeito Swamp’s mysterious Konpeito King. As Pom defeats these enemies, her backpack will fill up with ingredients, building materials, and weapons. While I was always happy to collect ingredients, even as I was finishing up the game the weapons I was picking up were useless. The random nature of the weapon attributes and the fact that they don’t ever increase in strength or rarity largely made them a waste of inventory space. Even if you’re a pragmatic adventurer, you can only sell certain things to certain townsfolk, so that spatula may take up room in your backpack until you can sell it to the blacksmith Briquette, who may not even be working the day you return from one of the dungeons.
You can rank up your equipment and weapons through either brewing them to change or add effects or upgrading them from one to five star rating with the blacksmith. I found this entire process to be more trouble than it’s worth, as you have to manually unequip the weapon, gloves, or boots you’re wearing, then leave them with that respective vendor for a day. While this is fine in a vacuum, since you can spend the day tending your restaurant instead of adventuring, the gameplay flow can sometimes run to a screeching halt, as I often found myself wondering if I should just sleep through the in-game day to keep the story moving along because I may not have enough ingredients to actually open the restaurant. Upgrading equipment also takes money and resources that could be going towards the restaurant. This is compounded by the fact that upgrades don’t actually do much — my latest upgrade was to take my Salt N’ Pepper Shakers (think boxing gloves) to four stars, which increased their damage by a whopping ONE attack point. Finding gear that gave me a chance to toss out offensively-pungent durian fruit and, later, egg timer bombs to stunlock enemies even at a distance as well as getting a dash with a projectile shield did much more for my dungeon-diving than any upgrade.
This is a bit of a shame, because Cuisineer doesn’t just keep the food in the kitchen. Like the aforementioned Salt N’ Pepper Shakers, you’ll find a small selection of deadly cooking tools such as the Spatula, Smackerel, Tenderiser, Kebab Skewer, or Throwing Plates, which each have different pros and cons. Sadly, it doesn’t actually matter as combat remains relatively flat beyond an egregious final boss that I ended up turning the difficulty down for. The game seems much more interested in throwing as many projectiles, enemies, and hard to deal with attacks as possible at the player instead of asking them to think carefully and cautiously about moving through the dungeon. While the difficulty can be turned down at any time, to the point that Pom takes 80% less damage, I would have preferred to actually be able to enjoy combat. The difficulty settings also don’t address that some enemies are simply much too tanky. Additionally, in what feels like a design mistake, ranged weapons (or at least Throwing Plates) cannot destroy projectiles, while melee weapons can. I could never find a good time to use the Throwing Plates’ super, as that would just result in me getting hit by projectiles or left in a deadly and disadvantageous state. Bizarrely, if you have a melee weapon and equipment that produces a ranged attack, like Durian Bombs, it will take care of ranged projectiles. This feels like an oversight.
Another issue is that it can be hard to see what’s going on during combat, with projectiles reaching a near bullet hell level from both enemies and Pom. Oftentimes, I just had to spam my attack button as creatures often do not have a distinct death cry, and my Durian Bombs’ stink clouds obscured what was happening. It is also worth noting that since many of your enemies are animated ingredients, they often drop items that look nearly identical to themselves as a living enemy. I took damage from the tadpole-like Kailans more than I’d like to admit because I confused them with the Leafy Greens they would drop. To add salt to the wound, it can be hard to find enemies as well, with some blending into the backdrop.
The game provides very little tutorialisation, perhaps too little considering you dash doubles as your “jump” and you can destroy or reflect projectiles. The latter of which is so essential to surviving even the most basic of encounters you would think the game would guide you with a quest or tip screen, but Cuisineer does no such thing. Combat encounters become so frantic and punishing that I did not discover the ability to reflect projectiles until very late in the game.
Issues aren’t isolated just to combat. The map is bugged in that when you access it, it will show the entire map before zooming in and only showing the parts that aren’t covered by fog of war. The inventory system is also a mess. I don’t know if that’s exclusive to the Switch version, but Cuisineer could definitely use some improvements in that area. There is no way to root through items, or automatically sell/destroy/avoid items — what you pick up is what you pick up. Though ingredients and building materials stack, each weapon (the majority of which are useless) takes up one of your very valuable inventory slots, and even if you want to try to see if a weapon might be an upgrade, if you discard one it is gone forever. I mentioned before how weapons are pretty bad, so you probably will not hold onto many of them.
The main quest eventually feels like it was designed as a placeholder, with a ludicrous amount of money you need to save. You earn money at a nice pace, but the more affluent customers that might come to your restaurant are too rare to keep up with what the game asks you to spend. Even with all but one of the recipes unlocked, a Noble customer may mumble under their breath “ew” as they enter your establishment and be angry that you don’t have ingredients for a particular meal. This is where my real issue with Cuisineer rears its head, as I’ve put over 400 hours into the game, and enjoyed most of it. The story seemed to have something to say about capitalism, taxes, and bad parents, until it didn’t. This seems to permeate the game, which is enjoyable up to a point. The final showdown is probably the biggest example of this, as almost none of what occurs is explained. You’ve spent far too much time building funds to challenge the League of Cuisineers and test your mettle, only to be presented with an unexplained cooking competition where you (and not your opponent) must endure an astonishing amount of enemies, including mini-bosses. Finally, you encounter the last boss who I won’t spoil — but it resulted in me turning down the difficulty and just wanting the game to be over.
Even with all those negatives, Cuisineer is a very interesting game. The music fits well, and the vibrant art style and in particular well-thought-out sound design really make it a passable example of what I’d call a “cozy” game like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. The biomes are all very colourful, and the character design of the villagers reminds me of a fighting game or an Overwatch silhouette, where I can glance at a character and instantly get an idea of what they’re about. Young villagers sway back and forth with youthful energy. Fancy nobles walk with a distinctive strut that’s been practiced and perfected. Sound design, especially on the restaurant parts of this game, really shows an effort to immerse the player. The design and art of the various recipes you pick up are also gorgeous — part of me felt like I was in an episode of Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma with how lovingly food is described in this game. You’ll hear things like the distinctive sound of a customer slurping and munching on a meal, the sound of a nice dinner plate being picked up, the distinctive crackle and pop of a fried dish being made.
Not being penalised isn’t just something featured in the restaurant side of the game, but seems to permeate the entire game, interestingly enough. Die in a dungeon? No biggie, you’ll lose most of your items, but you end up back in your bed safe and sound. Too injured to actually finish the dungeon? That’s fine, teleport out with your goods and come back some other time. Want to build up some funds for renovations or various other improvements to better take on the days ahead? Completely okay — yes, you owe a debt, but there’s no actual deadline (or at least I didn’t hit one). I can definitely see this as a game someone comes to for comfort without any real pressure, or a game to come back to every so often.
Cuisineer is so close to being a hit menu item at your favourite eatery. But the delight in my eyes as I ordered it, and started to devour it dulled as I realised I was tired of chewing and it was actually quite a bland taste about halfway through my meal. As a big fan of the Rune Factory series, I was really engaged up to the point I was asked to grind for hours on end to make a modicum of progress. I wouldn’t send this meal back to the kitchen, but I probably wouldn’t order the dish again. BattleBrew Productions got much about Cuisineer right, but with just a bit more time cooking to make sure combat, the economy, and the latter half of the game provide that irresistible mix of flavours that hooked me in the first place, I’m sure Pom would do her parents proud without question.
