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Premature Evaluation: Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!Yes chef
Yes chef
Developer:Vertigo GamingPublisher:Vertigo GamingRelease:January 29th (early access)On:WindowsFrom:SteamFor:£11.39, $15, €12.49
TheCook, Serve, Deliciousseries of restaurant simulators are designed to dissuade anyone from ever considering becoming a professional chef. They are hardcore time-attack food prep games in which the vast breadth of the culinary arts are reduced to a combination of deft keystrokes, recipes become quickfire memory puzzles, your kitchen is a foodie mind palace and orders stack up like tetrominoes.
If you’ve ever watched Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares USA – the superior version of the Kitchen Nightmares global franchise, because oh man,Americans– there is the inevitable scene in which Gordon holds up a bad lasagna to a flailing head chef and demands to know what kind of bullshit he thinks he’s serving. Look at that, he says, holding the bad lasagna up to his chin and glowering over it like a menace. I wouldn’t serve that to my cat you wretched bollock, you utter stain of a garbage human, you miserable wetness. Look at it, he screams. And the chef looks right at it, and places his hands on his hips, and he knows deep down that heshouldbe incredibly ashamed of the bad lasagna.
But watch his eyes carefully. He isn’t ashamed, because he has chef vision. He sees the lasagna before him as it truly is: P-S-M-C-R, P-S-M-C-R. Pasta, sauce, meat, cheese, parmesan. Pasta, sauce, meat, cheese, parmesan. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Cook. All of the constituent parts of a lasagna are right there, and in the correct order too. Ramsay can scream all he likes, but no dictionary in the world could deny that this is a lasagna. Cook a lasagna at home and you are Michelangelo. Cook seventy lasagnas an evening and you are Henry Ford at the assembly line.
Cook, Serve, Delicious 3?! embodies the Ramsayan philosophy of the kitchen as a factory, and takes this challenging restaurant simulator on the road, placing you in charge of a food truck as it makes its way across post-apocalypse America. Each day you make several stops, where hungry customers will arrive to order from your pre-selected menu of half a dozen or so dishes. The game is played on a keyboard – other control schemes are available, but it’s still a typing game at its heart – with each dish requiring a series of keystrokes in order to prepare the recipe. This is Typing of the Dead meets Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Minute Meals. Mavis Beacon x Nigella Lawson.
How all of these varyingly complex dishes interact with one another on the menu forms part of the meta-strategy part of CSD3, where a well constructed menu can ensure that your attention can be evenly distributed across refilling your holding areas between stops and prepping special orders when they arrive. Serving customers while preparing new orders is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head, while doing your taxes on a bike. There are six slots in which orders arrive, and food can burn or lose freshness if you take your eye off any one of the balls you’re juggling. Customers can get tired of waiting and leave if you’re too busy stacking custom-order burgers. It can all go south quickly, and frequently does.
A relentless and strategic kitchen management game,Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!rewards hard effort with moments of transcendental clarity, when plates start flowing and everything is slotting into place. It is meditation. I have never felt a greater sense of peace and purpose than when rolling six burritos in less than five seconds. Prescribe it to people who have lost their way.
