Have you ever wanted to run a restaurant? How about fighting weird monsters from an isometric perspective with food-themed weapons, like giant meat tenderisers? What if you could combine these two things by feeding the pieces of the monsters you’ve killed to your restaurant customers? Well, don’t be too shocked, but that’s exactly what Cuisineer is! The game begins with you, Pom, who appears to be a catgirl, returning to your hometown of Paell and finding the family restaurant in a state of disrepair. Her parents have gone away, racking up a debt in the process that someone needs to pay. Obviously, as is typical in debt-em-ups as I am now calling them, you’re the person that has to pay this off and you’re going to do it using oversized spatulas and your parents disused restaurant.
Cuisineer gives a very strong first impression. It’s bright, colourful and well animated, and it feels great to play. The combat in particular is incredibly punchy, you can feel the impact of your weapons and it’s very responsive and quick. Running the restaurant is also a strange delight, as always in games like this. There’s just something about dashing around preparing dishes, taking payments, and occasionally stopping a dine and dasher that’s just inherently enjoyable.
The problem is that it is repetitive to the extreme.
Let’s start with combat. After that first run and getting a feel for how the fighting works, my second was immediately felt too familiar with its environments. I’m obviously starting off in the same zone so I expect the theming to be similar, but I was fighting through map tiles that I’d been through on my first run. I suppose I expected a much wider variety of tiles or more granular procedural generation, but every run thereafter I encountered the same again and again. It got incredibly same-y very quickly – even the enemies are usually in the same place and of the same type as last time.
The restaurant has a similar, but more pronounced issue. Whilst it is, much like the combat, enjoyable at first, it quickly gets dull due to how repetitive it is. You begin with a single pot to boil things in, preparing food to order for you while you wait for a timer to tick down, before you rush to take it to the customer (or for them to collect if you can’t be bothered). You can’t queue anything up until you upgrade it, which will also unlock higher tier recipes, but the experience of using it is always the same menu and timer. All the other kitchen workstations work in exactly the same way, so it soon loses its lustre and just feels like busy work.
The restaurant gameplay just never evolves as you would expect it to. With some additions, like staff to help in the restaurant, or something beyond just basic menu use for the cooking, with more variety in the wilderness, this game could be phenomenal. I love this kind of game where combat and management feed into one another, but while Cuisineer gets the basics very right, it doesn’t have enough depth to keep you going.
The stuff in between the restauranting and adventuring is also, unsurprisingly, very repetitive. You earn new recipes by completing side quests, which are almost always invariably bringing a person in the town a suspiciously large amount of something. 15 pieces of wood to make a painting, 25 of the rarest ingredient I’ve found so far, 10 of a specific dish that I have to cook myself, with a limited queue on the workstation that does it so I have to stand there staring at a menu whilst a bar fills up.
Upgrading your restaurant is slow and painstaking, with you investing large amounts of money and resources to unlock a handful of extra floor tiles for the first five upgrades. Your fridge also needs upgrading, as does your storage for wood and stone and so on, using the same resources. Wood, stone, orichalcum, and such all drop from rocks and trees that you can break whilst fighting, so you sometimes spend just as much time rushing around breaking trees and rocks as you do fighting the enemies.
The loot system is very limited as well, I haven’t found a new item for hours and the last one I did find – salt and pepper shakers – happened to handle exactly like the blue crystal boxing gloves I was already using. Each weapon has its own special power, but they sometimes leave you exposed whilst they activate and deal less damage than if you’d just attacked normally, so outside of a few that move you forward or attack from range I mostly ignored them. The affixes that items have seemed promising at first as well, with one or two that changed behaviours quite significantly, like leaving a puddle of ice when I dash that freezes enemies, but again they quickly became very same-y and once I’d started upgrading my equipment I didn’t want to switch to another and invest the cash to upgrade it.
Then as you head into the town of Paell, sometimes shops are closed so you can’t use them and everyone overshares the moment you speak to them. Despite how nice it looks, I found myself dreading having to venture into the town to find a specific side quest giver and deliver whatever disproportionate amount of food items they wanted, because there’s just so many that I could never remember which specific one it was. Every time I had just run between all of them and hope I found it sooner rather than later. It doesn’t help that sometimes they’re not even there, either.