Cuisineer review

Nothing beats a meal made from fresh-out-of-the-dungeon ingredients.

Much like a plate of comfort food, Cuisineer is both familiar and satisfying. You play as Pom, an adorable catgirl who returns home to the town of Paell to visit her mother and father. But unexpectedly, Pom’s parents decided to go on a protracted vacation, closing their underperforming restaurant in their absence. Soon after the spirited nekomusume decides to reopen the family business, she’s confronted by a tax collector who presents Pom with an excessively large debt.

Sure, it’s a simple premise, and beyond some lightly comical interaction with some of the folks who live and work in Paell, Cuisineer’s focus isn’t on storytelling. And that’s OK, as the game’s combination of dungeon crawling for ingredients and restaurant management is as scrumptious as milk tea with a heaping serving of spongy boba.

Food Fight

The former activity sends Pom into procedurally generated biomes rendered in an isometric perspective. Armed with makeshift tools like a spatula and a stack of plates, the plucky young girl is regularly ambushed by enemies like roughneck chickens and hot peppers that sporadically breathe out flames. However, if you dispatch these aggressors, you’ll randomly be rewarded with ingredients that are used for recipes back at your restaurant. Yes, the combat feels familiar, with Pom able to issue a flurry of light melee attacks or stronger assaults that are regulated by cooldown meters. Given the number of traps in the multi-storied dungeons, there’s satisfaction in luring enemies into ensnarements. But the generous disbursement of items means that Pom’s subterranean grocery runs aren’t excessively long.

Back at your family restaurant, The Potato Palace, you’ll convert all your collected ingredients into a variety of meals. Pleasingly, running your eatery eludes most of the micro-managerial duties of games found in the hectic Cook, Serve, Delicious! series. When patrons enter your establishment, they’ll quickly determine what they’d like to eat- and cooking up that meal requires only a single button press. Even better: the patrons are gratifyingly autonomous, picking up their own plates from a meal counter and neatly lining up at the register when they are done eating. Cuisineer’s one conceit is requiring special cooking for some of its more complicated fares. Of course, those workstations require cash and advanced recipes, but the competent cat-girls will realize these investments almost always yield dividends.

Savoring Cuisineer at Your Own Speed

Instead of worrying about production lines or setting prices, Pom’s main concern is furnishing the restaurant. Soon, you’ll require additional chairs and tables to accommodate the traffic that can occur during the multiple rush hours each day. Habitually, games that have you position fixtures in tight places can be tricky, with worries about blocking foot traffic. But Cuisineer is refreshingly approachable, offering green or red indicators that take most of the guesswork out of environmental design. That said, it would be great if you could reposition Potato Palace’s cash register.

Pleasingly, that’s not the only instance of lenience. Although you’ll eventually have to pay back the tax man, your timetable is far more Animal Crossing than anything like Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland. Ideally, more real-life bill collectors would adopt a Tom Nook-style approach to repayment. For some, that means that Cuisineer’s campaign might lack urgency. But I appreciated being able to freely select from dungeoneering or running the family diner each day. Agreeably, it’s not even a binary option, and it’s possible to tackle both activities within an in-game calendar day.

Undesirable Flavors

But like a restaurant opening, Cuisineer isn’t free of imperfections. At present one of the biggest issues is the lack of instruction for some of the game’s actions. At one point, I left a cooked meal out on the counter overnight. When I returned the next day, it had gone bad, but the game didn’t communicate how to toss it out. Although load times aren’t excessively long, shifting between areas is accompanied by a rather annoying delay. Perhaps developer BattleBrew Productions could offer more than a single transition screen, the pauses wouldn’t be as irritating. And while it’s more of an annoyance, the sharing of weapons and items in your persistently undersized inventory feels like an oversight.

But if you can peer past these minor transgressions, there’s quite a bit to love about playing Cuisineer. The game’s recipes are all rendered with mouth-watering exquisiteness, with dishes like ice kacang or chashu ramen getting seductive close-up shots. And while you’ll mainly have transactional relationships with your fellow townsfolk, the well-drawn character portraits would be ideal for a dating simulation component. After all, who wouldn’t fall for a dragon-girl who vends rejuvenating milk tea?

Cuisineer was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.